Music

About My Music

Music is the component of Xbox Media Center that tames your hunger for great music. Some of the key features of Music are: Support for a countless number of formats and codecs. You can find a full list here. A full-featured Music Library that makes it easy to organize, find and listen to your favorite music Built in ability to stream media from other computers Full support for Playlists, including Smart Playlists The capability to stream thousands of radio stations directly from the internet Fully integrated support for LastFM Jaw-dropping Visualizations that add the visual element to your music experience A fully customizable view Integrated CD Ripping

File:Mymusic.jpg

Using Music

You will find the interface of Music as easy to operate as the rest of Xbox Media Center.

• General Navigation
• Music Navigation and Control

Here you can see the default keymapping for:

• XBOX Controller
• XBOX DVD-Remote.

OSD (On Screen Display)

File:Osd.mymusic.png

There are two different On Screen Displays (or "OSD" for short) available in Music: The mini-control Press the Start Button on the controller to display the mini control. The Visualization OSD The Visualizations OSD is pictured to the right and is available by pressing Start (Menu on the Remote) while in visualization mode. The Buttons on the OSD are as follows: 1. Now Playing - Selecting this opens the Now Playing Playlist 2. Select Visualization - Allows you to select the visualization being displayed 3. Visualization Preset - Allows you to select the visualization preset being displayed 4. Visualization Settings - Allows you to configure the current visualization

Sources for Music

See main article: Media Sources

XBMC gives you the ability to listen to music from a variety of sources, click here for more information and examples of music sources(link).
Some examples of sources that allow you to easily access all your digital music collection:

• On your computer or a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device/system, which supports SMB file sharing
• Stored directly on the hard drive of your Xbox
• On CDs/DVDs in the Xbox DVD drive
• Streamed from the Internet

For information on how to configure remote file shares, please click here (link)

Listing Modes Available in Music

Files View Files View is the most basic way of browing your music. In Files View, you browse through your sources folder by folder, in the exact same way they are stored. What you see in Files View is the same as you would see if you were to browse the folders on your computer.

Library Mode See main article: Music Library The Library Mode is much more advanced and has many more features than Files Mode. In order to utilize Library Mode, you first need to scan your music into the Music Library using The Context Menu. Be patient, as this can take quite a while if you have a large music collection. File:Library.mymusic.jpg Playlists See main article: Playlists Audio Playlists are also fully supported. Album Art & Thumbnails See main article: Thumbnails There are a number of ways to get thumbnails to display in My Music. Album art can by obtained via Allmusic.com and described in the The Context Menu section. Music tags can also contain art for that specific song, as can be seen in Preparing your Music. If you want a custom thumb, you can add a .tbn file to your music directory. The .tbn file can be either a .JPG or a .PNG file (with transparancy) that you simply rename the extension from .jpg/.png to .tbn. The size of the picture can be anything from 64x64 to 256x256 in pixel-size (you may want to use a larger pixel-size if you use XBMC in 720p/1080i HDTV resolution to get a sharper image). Examples: In this example audiofilename.mp3 will use audiofilename.tbn as thumbnail: Music\path\audiofilename.mp3 Music\path\audiofilename.tbn File:Mymusic.jpg The same goes for playlists, cue-sheets, SHOUTcast, and internet-stream files, eg: Music\path\audioplaylistname.m3u Music\path\audioplaylistname.tbn Music\path\cuelistname.cue Music\path\cuelistname.tbn Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.pls Music\path\shoutcastlinkname.tbn Music\path\audiostreamname.strm Music\path\audiostreamname.tbn If you store each of your music-albums or artists in a separate subfolder to keep things organized, you can also make the folder have a custom thumbnail image. To do this you need to rename your .jpg thumbnail as folder.jpg and place it in the folder (the size of the picture can be anything from 64x64 to 256x256 in pixel size). Example: Music\path\album\folder.jpg Now your album/artist folder will have a lovely custom thumbnail-image.