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Xbox Music Mixer Xbox Microsoft Studios  Xbox
Music Mixer is a strange combination of media player and karaoke machine,
and while it's main purpose seems to be karaoke with the included
microphone, the terrible amount of songs available make it simply
seem like a half-assed attempt to provide Xbox users with a media
player. Even in this respect it is lacking, as there are some features
that should have been included but are completely overlooked.The karaoke function has a total of 16 songs from all kinds of artists including the the B-52's, Madonna and the Village People, and a few typical drunken songs like For He's a Jolly Good Fellow and Auld Lang Syne. The microphone, which has a cartridge that links to the controller with a standard 1 inch audio plug feels very light and plastic, mainly because it is, but it works well enough. If you really wanted to you could use a more professional microphone, and you can even hook up the Xbox Live! headset for duets. Whilst the 16 songs are barely adequate, Live! functionality comes into play for downloading new visualisations and Xbox Karaoke packs. The packs cost about A$13 and are charged to the credit card you signed up with. Alternatively you can go to websites such as xboxkaraoke.com and pay for individual songs. You download these and use the PC to xbox transfer tool found on the Xbox.com website. There's an advert when you start the included karaoke songs to visit chartbusterkaraoke.com and this implies you may be able to play normal karaoke discs as well. You can also put your own music CDs in and the Xbox to sing along to. You can use audio compression to tear out the middle and sing along without lyrics, and whilst this is adequate it's no better than what can be done with computer programs such as Soundforge. Obviously the words will not come up, but the Xbox will display album, artist and track information if it is hard encoded onto the disk. Now, here's where the Music Mixer misses the boat - why not use the Live! service to look up track and title information? Given Microsoft's Media Player 9 series for PC does this, surely the Xbox could. The Music Player suffers the same problem as the karaoke in that it doesn't look up the CD information. This is fine for some CDs that include the information, but keying in title and artist information via the controller is a royal pain in the arse. The saving grace here is that if you have a PC that connects to your Xbox, you can transfer files from your computer hard drive. On the PC you can name the tracks and artist using whichever ripping tool you use, and then transport the files using the aforementioned transfer tool available at Xbox.com. The downside to this is you need to have a PC running Windows XP, but I found the actual transfer to be rather painless. Even the router that screws up some Live! games for me didn't have a problem transferring the data across. However, the Xbox re-encodes the data, so on MP3s downloaded from the Internet there is a loss of quality in some cases. The visualisations are as good as you'll find with any PC media player, and include the usual strobing circles and fractals and even a 3D "rave" with different dancers. Many of these are interactive, and you can play around with the controller to get different effects. You can transfer photos from your PC using the transfer tool, and they can be shown as a slide show to music as well. An advanced music player comes in the form of "Rave mode" where you can apply videos and audio effects in real time to CDs and audio already on the Xbox. It's fun for a while, as you can apply whacked out filters and scratches and so on to music as well as becoming a virtual VJ, but the fact that you can't upload your own sound effects, scratches or video severely limits the fun you can have. In fact, that you can't transfer video at all is a serious oversight. The Xbox Music Mixer misses a great opportunity to turn the Xbox from a games console into a multi-media player. The ability to transfer music files from PC to Xbox easily is it's only saving grace. The lack of being able to transfer video, it's inability to find title, artist and track information, and the lack of songs included on the disc sour it down to lemon status.  |
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