Name That Tune

If, like many of us, you’ve got got hundreds of CDs in your music collection, there are probably a handful for tracks on each album that you actually like and listen to.Yet you’re forced to search through a disorganised mess to find the CD you want, and then suffer the inconvenience of having to put on one CD at a time. What a drag!

All that clutter and confusion is a thing of the past with my Xbox 360™. With its 20GB hard drive, you can rip your CDs, save them to hard disk, and play the music you want at the press of a button.

Best of all, you don't have to enter in a single title thanks to metadata services provided by Microsoft®.Xbox 360 retrieves the artist, album title, song titles, and other information for me. No more albums starting with "Track 1", but instead a detailed jukebox ready to entertain your friends.

Organise your entire music library

Meta What?
If you own an original Xbox®, you’ll know that ripping music to your Xbox is an easy affair, but it's also time consuming. All the pertinent details about a record – song titles, for example – must be manually entered via an onscreen keyboard.

You might opt for skipping naming the tracks altogether. It's the easy way out, but it also makes it very difficult to know what song is playing.Thanks to the metadata services, you’ll automatically get titles for your tracks.

Xbox 360 uses the same database system as Windows Media Player, so when you put a CD into the disc tray some magic happens behind the scenes. Non-Xbox Live® subscribers get the benefit of album look-up when the hard drive is installed; it comes pre-loaded with a large quantity of metadata.

If your CD matches one stored locally, the album details automatically appear. If you've got an Xbox Live Silver (free) or Gold (premium) Membership and you're connected, Xbox 360 automatically searches the online database for the most up-to-date information available. Of course, the library of available titles is always expanding, so you'll want to get on Xbox Live to access all the latest album information.

Fully Customisable
Mistakes do happen, and you might occasionally encounter some online details about your favorite artist that are inaccurate, like a misspelled song title. Xbox 360 lets you edit your music library, so you can fix little mistakes, add additional information, or rename titles completely. This really comes in handy if you’re ripping a rare or relatively unknown CD that isn't listed in the online database.

Let's say your band just pressed its first album. You don't have national distribution or a publicist – yet – but want to stream your band's tunes in-game or put it into rotation at your next party. You still have the option to manually enter the details in. Of course, thanks to the metadata services provided by Microsoft, you won't have to do this with the majority of your other CDs.

Organise your music any way you see fit, by title, artist, genre, or otherwise. As your collection grows, it'll be simple to track down that elusive track that's stuck in your head. And you won't have to crawl around on the floor to find it.

Article by Franklin Beans