Well the commercials say it only does everything...

So, since my computer died and took my MP3 collection with it, I gotta get my music re-digitialized. I had some of it backed up but figured since I have it all on CD anyway I may as well just redo it from scratch. lots of those files are real old.

Anyway, I thought maybe instead of putting them all on the PC, I'd put them on my PS3 so I can listen to music on my home theater. I've imported a few CDs so far. But I have about 300 to go. Is it worth it? am I better off just transfering everything to the PS3 from a PC somehow?

Right now I'm without a PC good enough, I gotta wait a few weeks for my laptop to be delivered before I can start adding my music to that. So I thought importing it all "native" into my PS3 might be a good idea. or is it a waste of time for some reason?

I stream most of my music to my PS3 now when I listen at home, but I still keep all the files on my PC:

1) you can always add more hard drives to your PC if you run out of space; I rip my CDs at full PCM size or whatever, and it adds up fast.

2) if I want to burn something to a CD-R to listen to in my car or for a friend, I need a PC. If you are digital in your car system, this wouldn't apply.

If you don't have an mp3 player to sync to and you don't have a wireless network at your disposal, then what you're doing is probably fine (assuming you have a big enough drive in your PS3, say 120GB+). Personally, I keep all my music (and videos) stored on my desktop computer and just stream to my PS3 when I need it. There's a handful of free programs out there that'll do that part for you (I use Tversity).

Regardless, keeping your digital media in one place is not such a good idea, as you've now found out. You should probably invest in a backup harddrive no matter what.

Streaming media from a PC to the PS3 is the more common option but it requires that your PC is on 24/7 and browsing the media collection is not as smooth as local media. I much prefer the standalone approach.

I initially attached a 1TB USB harddrive to my PS3 and placed a copy of all of my music, pictures, and some of my DVDs on it. That works well, but there are a few limitations with that approach (cannot make playlists)

So I upgraded the internal harddrive of my 80GB PS3 to 500GB. Using the 1TB drive as the source, I copied all of the media to it. Works great. Smooth. Self-contained.

well I am wireless, I have an apple airport N router, it's got a usb port on it for a hard drive so I was actually thinking about putting my music on that so all systems can see it. But, since it won't be on my PC per se, I'm guessing the PS3 won't be able to see it? Or maybe I can use that external drive to copy everything to the PS3, and then just add new CDs as I buy them. then I won't have to import all 300+ CDs twice.

Turns out, I didn't lose everything. I totally forgot I have almost everything except my last 10 or so new CDs on my old computer at work but still I think it'd be nice to re-import everything fresh.

I use my PS3 to store quite a few of my cds in WMA format. I even have them in order by band name and album title with album covers. It took me quite a bit of time to do this and sucked since I've done it twice after my first 60gb died. I changed the name of each album using the PC to include the artist plus album name so that they could be together. This is the format that I used:
Rush - R30
Rush - Snakes & Arrows

I hated having to scroll up and down to find different albums by the same artist and this method works out well. Plus, it keeps the all together on my external HDD and when I'm browsing my music on the PC.

As an FYI, I haven't found a way to stream MP4 Itunes music that I've downloaded from ITunes. I believe it is a DRM issue.