Name That Tune

I've got hundreds of CDs in my music collection, from classical and jazz to hip hop and metal. Before MP3s, my home was a junkyard of milk crates, plastic CD towers, and busted jewel cases. If a song popped into my head, I'd have to search through a disorganized mess to find the album. Forget custom playlists—unless I spent the afternoon crafting a mix tape or compilation CD, I was forced to listen to one artist 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 attached, I can rip every album in my collection, save it to hard disk, and play the music I want at the press of a button.

Best of all, I 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. Now my collection isn't a mess of albums starting with "Track 1", but a detailed jukebox ready to entertain my guests.

Easily access your music library.

Meta What?
If you own an original Xbox®, you already know what I'm talking about. 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.

If you're like me, you skip 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, the titling process is automatic.

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

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 Customizable
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 pop in 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.

Organize 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 ditty that's stuck in your head.

And you won't have to crawl around on the floor to find it.

Article by Franklin Beans

• Audio fidelity
• Media Center connectivity.
• Dev interview: Live functionality.