How to get purchased protected iTunes tracks on your PSP.

I do enjoy Apple's iTunes Music store and I have bought several albums from them. They only sell protected files that can not be played on the PSP. However with a blank CD-RW or CD-R and iTunes you can get some DRM-free MP3 files that are good to go on the PSP. This does not require any real hacking tools and I believe this is OK with Apple's term of use on iTunes. This is pretty simple stuff and for those of you who already know this then skip ahead. Apple is cool with you burning purchased iTunes tracks to a CD and they are also cool with encoding CDs to MP3s using iTunes.

1. Take your purchased iTunes tracks and put them on a new play list called "Tunes for PSP" or something like that. Make sure to keep it under 80 or 72 Minutes of music depending on your CD-R or CD-RW disk.

2. Set your iTunes Burning preferences to Audio CD and set your Importing preference to MP3 Encoder High Quality.

3. Burn the play list to the CD-RW or CD-R.

4. When the burn is done highlight all the audio tracks on the CD in iTunes and bring up the Track Info by Command+I or Right Clicking it.

5. Add a little (MP3) suffix to the album name.

6. Then rip your burned CD into nice and DRM-free PSP ready MP3 files. Since you changed the album name iTunes will not freak out and try to replace the protected album that you already have in your iTunes library.

7. Then transfer your tracks to the PSP manually or with iPSP or PSPWare.

8. Erase your CD-RW disk and wash rinse repeat as needed.

Since you already purchased the iTunes tracks and your not sharing it with others it should all be on the Up and Up. I do warn you that this will really annoy you if you are still using that piss poor 32 Meg Memory stick that came with your PSP. You can't even fit a full album on the card it will really make you want to get a bigger beefier Memory Stick. I am not going to be doing this every day since I have an iPod Mini but it would be cool to have a good album or two in my PSP at all time. It would be really cool if game developers would let you play your own MP3 files on the Memory stick as a custom game soundtrack. It is pretty slick on Xbox racing games and it would be slick on the PSP.

Credit to 8bitjoystick.com for this great how to