PSP to support MP3s

On Thursday, Sony announced that its next generation of music players would support MP3s. This was a reversal of a long-standing policy by the company of having all but a few machines solely support its proprietary ATRAC audio format.

On Friday, it was revealed that Sony's new policy will also extend to the PSP. Besides playing games and movies, Sony had previously announced the device will also play music encoded in ATRAC format. However, today on the official Japanese Sony PSP spec page, the device is clearly listed as supporting the "MP3" format as well as ATRAC.

Besides the contentious issue of its still-unclear battery life, one of the biggest questions surrounding the PSP was whether or not it would support MP3s, the de facto standard format for digital music. Now that it does, the PSP will be much more attractive to gadgeteers eager to take their burgeoning MP3 libraries on the go.