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Playstation Vita as a music player

I'm trying this out, and I haven't committed to it as of yet. There is a lot of jank here if you choose to go down this route. Benefits and drawbacks, all the rest.

There are pretty much 3 options for music playback here. You have the default music player, ElevenMPV-A, and VitaShell. Each have their problems. And there are a fair few of those.

Default Music Player

This is probably the most fleshed out music player you're going to get here. It has your standard Artist/Album/Song/Genre support, playlists too, though all things considered, this is quite primitive.

It does have a very pretty interface though.

The default music player (rather obviously) has the best integration with the rest of your Vita. It'll keep playing if you put your device to sleep, and it works with the quick settings menu thing too.

I do lament the lack of controls when your device is sleeping. You can't play/pause easily when the thing is in your pocket, for example. You've gotta turn the thing on, unlock, and then play/pause.

I'm not going to complain about the lack of creature comforts you get in modern music players, such as queues and playlist creation and stuff like that. In that sort of regard, you can treat the Vita as an iPod. You've got to manage your library elsewhere.

If you can look past that, the jank here comes from getting your music on to your device. The official way is through Sony's CMA, which (a) isn't supported anymore and (b) does not have a version for Linux. QCMA exists, but in my experience QCMA is also pretty janky. It worked, but it wasn't reliable.

The other way you can import your music library is through a piece of homebrew known as MediaImporter. This works pretty well.

You've got to place your music files in ux0://music. Launch this app, press cross, and it'll add your music to the app.

It doesn't seem to import playlists.

I've not been able to get this app to display album art at all. It's properly embedded in my music files, but it just won't show up. If you know anything about this, please get in touch!

VitaShell

This is probably the least practical music player here. It does play your music though, can verify that.

ElevenMPV-A

This is probably the second best option you've got here, though this has its issues too.

This acts as more of a file browser, which is a definitely a valid way to browse your music, but just not for me.

It does read tags, however, and the player itself is quite similar to the official app. Album art, for me at least, worked only if I had a cover.jpg or cover.png file in the same directory as the rest of the files. Embedded album art didn't seem to show up.

There is integration with the quick settings menu, but play/pause doesn't work. Volume adjustment does, however, so does background playback and all the rest.

This article was written on 08/06/2024. If you have any thoughts, feel free to send me an email with them. Have a nice day!