Consolidate your music library (to write up soon)

Before I forget, I really need to consolidate my music library. Right now I have three different music libraries sitting on a desktop, my macbook, and on an external hard drive. Most of this music, I will never hear again in my life. Some of it I want to keep just in case I’m in the mood. The rest I want to listen to it all the time. I don’t want to lose my iTunes ratings and album covers! Hopefully I’ll learn how to do this soon and post it right here.

Using your Xbox 360 to remotely view videos (and listen to music)

Some people have Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate and this allows them to use Media Center to connect to their Xbox 360 by using a the “media extender” option. I tried doing this over the wireless network and it failed miserably (I am not sure what went wrong). Anyway, on my actual “media” desktop, I have a licensed version of Windows Vista Business which does not include Media Center. So does that mean I can’t watch videos remotely on my Xbox? No, just follow these directions.

On your Windows computer go to Windows Media Player 11 and click on Library > Media Sharing. Go ahead and check the boxes that you want to share media to (i.e. Other PC’s, Xbox 360, etc.). You might as well find media that others are sharing as well. Hit the Settings button and add whatever you like.

Now when you go to your Xbox, goto the media tab and go to videos (music, or photos) and change the source to the desktop you just configured. You should see the network name of the computer and set that as the sources (as opposed to the Xbox hard drive). You should be able to browse the folders that you just added in your media libraries now (goto Library > Options > Library > Monitor Folders on your PC to add more monitored folders).

Unlock protected music!

The easiest way to unlock music purchased from places such as iTunes is to burn it to a CD and then re-rip the CD and encoding it back to MP3. This will remove the protection that is put on it so that you can play it on any computer or media player. Note that you will probably have some quality loss in this process…

You can also record the music again using Audacity and then re-encode the music using Audacity’s LAME MP3 encoder plugin. I’m not sure if this loses any quality or not, but is for sure a pain in the ass.