foos Posted October 7, 2006 Report Share Posted October 7, 2006 If you think this belongs somewhere else by all means moves it. thx. (or at least fix my topic. thanks.) In a nut shell I am looking for advice on where I should be consolidating my music library which is almost exclusively listend to on my 360. So, here is the deal. These days, (prior to kids & stuff it was different) I still buy CD's. I don't really use I tunes because I just don't listen to music anywhere other than when I am playing my 360. Oh, and in my truck, which I listen to the radio. However, I do like my music and have a few hundred songs copied to the 360 but I also have a few hundred more CD's to copy over. Here are my issues. If a could simply copy them all to my 360 I would be laughing seening as that is where I am using them. However I am usually lucky to have the space to copy one CD over, more less 500 and second don't find the playlist and sorting feature all that flexible or productive. And finally if my goal is to get rid of the physical CD's (and simply down load future music like the rest of the world). I would like to have them in a more stable invironment with a proper back ups in place. So where do I create this archive. I guess it comes down to Itunes or Media Centre. I run now almost exclusively on MACs and have 3 at home and a shit load and the office. There are a few PC severs/drones at the office but I bascially have to call an IT guy if I want them turned on/off, etc. That being said, I do have reason to change my power book into one of those macbook pros that you can swap back and forth between operation systems and I can learn if I have to.. SO anything is possible. Any advice is appreciated, and if I have missed any important details please let me know. Thanks J. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan FB Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 There's a piece of (pay) software called Connect360 that will let you stream an iTunes library from a Mac to a 360. The advantage of iTunes would be that you can use all your existing Mac hardware and knowledge instead of switching to something completely different. I haven't used XP MCE to compare, but iTunes is pretty easy to manage and organize music in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magness Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 Yes, Ryan's suggestion is a good one. The only other thing I would say is to back up whatever music you want to USB flash drives... They are dirt cheap now ($15 for 1gb) and would plug directly into 360 as an MP3 player. You will have the obvious issues of copy protection/file formats/etc but, you also wouldn't be taking up any precious HDD space on your 360's drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weremichael Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 I'm with Ryan on Connect360. It's a great application. I tried setting up a MCE box and found that it was less elegant and cumbersome (compared to my macs and ubuntu box). Stick with the mac. Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Union Carbine Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 For music, can't you just use the standard network connection between Windows and the 360? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dogbert Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 Foos isn't using a WinXP box, he's using a Mac. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orpheus Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 You could always get a cheap external USB hard drive to hook up to the 360. You can find 200 - 300 gig models for $100 or less these days. You could easily rip all your cd's onto it and have access to them on the 360. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeyN Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 I use Connect 360 for the Mac. Works good Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foos Posted October 8, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 Thanks guys. A lot of good advice here. This problem does stem from a lack of hard drive space and simply plugging in an external drive is brilliant. Thanks. I didn't realize you could do that. I feel like I am constantly managing my drive space and have probably deleted a couple dozen traillers/demos that I didn't really want to. If this solves that I am very happy. However as for music unless the next Live upgrade improves the music feature set I definitely want to move my music. Making playlist on the 360 is just too grueling and I want to make the jump and to buying my music on line and get rid of all me CD's. And as you probably know copying burned CD's looses all the tags, (names, genera, etc.) But I have a few more questions. I had down loaded connect 360 a while back but seeing as I don't really keep anything on my laptop I never really tried it. However now that I have installed it and I apologize if I am missing to totally obvious, what do I do now. It is recognizing my 360 but I can seem figure how to get the 360 to see the powerbook. Is this a port issue? If I am streaming music will I lose some of the in game feature like skipping tracks or when it's displays what song you are playing, etc.? and is this still true if you use windows media centre? I have decided next week I am going to trade my powerbook in for a macbook pro w/ windows XP pro installed. So I don't want to rule out anything. And theoretically, I could use both. Thanks Again Everyone. J. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan FB Posted October 8, 2006 Report Share Posted October 8, 2006 Making playlist on the 360 is just too grueling and I want to make the jump and to buying my music on line and get rid of all me CD's.Keep in mind that anything you purchase from the iTunes store will have DRM on it that will pretty much limit playback to only iTunes or an iPod. iTunes purchased songs can not be played back by a 360 with the Connect360 software.I had down loaded connect 360 a while back but seeing as I don't really keep anything on my laptop I never really tried it. However now that I have installed it and I apologize if I am missing to totally obvious, what do I do now. It is recognizing my 360 but I can seem figure how to get the 360 to see the powerbook. Is this a port issue? Here's a mini-guide from the Connect360 FAQ:How do I connect? Ensure that no firewall is active on your Mac and that "Access Control List" is turned off in Connect360's settings (or add your Xbox's IP to it). Go to the System->Computers section in the Xbox menus and make sure you disconnect from all computers. Restart the Xbox360. Next, go to the Media->Music->Computer section and answer Yes when prompted regarding the Windows Media Connect software. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foos Posted October 9, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 9, 2006 I downloaded the new version of connect360. It configured my firewall automatically and everything is working fine. Actually much better than I expected. Being able to stream internet radio and podcasts int game is pretty cool. Shame about the DRM thing. Thanks again. J. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weremichael Posted October 9, 2006 Report Share Posted October 9, 2006 Shame about the DRM thing. Thanks again. J. Burn your DRM songs off onto a cdr/w then rerip them as whatever format you want. I've done that several times to backup my songs (because if you lose them apple won't obviously give them to you again for free) and to stream them to the 360. Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foos Posted October 9, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 9, 2006 I know. Kinda of a pain, but I would do it if there was a way of keeping the tags. (titles, genera, etc.) I am under the impression that this info is lost. Correct me if I am wrong. J. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisBardon Posted October 10, 2006 Report Share Posted October 10, 2006 Making playlist on the 360 is just too grueling I noticed the other day that it looks like the 360 can pick up m3u playlists off of a PC, so you might be able to just set up all of your playlists ahead of time. The external hard drive idea is a good one though, but as a random question, are there external drives out there that have ethernet or wifi built in (kind of a cheap NAS solution)? Just thinking that it'd be great to have a portable storage device that's visible to a home network, so you could have the drive connected to the 360, but still transfer files to it without moving it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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