Xbox Music Mixer

by Microsoft

Product Features

• Bring the club experience to your home with the interactive media player -- anyone can mix, match, shuffle, and customize soundtracks
• Digital lyric stripping technology allows players to remove the vocals from their favorite songs for instant karaoke
• Become the producer and add cool real time audio effects and transitions
• Snap some life into ordinary digital slide shows by linking photos to customized soundtracks, effects and narrative tracks
• PC media sharing & Xbox Live support help you create the ultimate music and video library!

Product Details

• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00009X3VO
• Item Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: June 15, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,926 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

With Music Mixer, Xbox players can now bring the club experience home by unlocking the digital entertainment capabilities of Xbox.

Players can share digital photos and music stored on the PC, sing Karaoke, view digital slide shows set to music, experience CD playback, store music, enhance a party with 2-D and 3-D visualizers, and more. Music Mixer, which will hit retail shelves with a microphone, offers a Karaoke feature allowing players to sing several of today's popular Karaoke songs, such as the B-52's "Love Shack" or Jimmy Eats World's "The Middle". In addition, you can insert your favorite CD and sing along when Mixer strips out the vocals. And the brave at heart can actually record their performance and play back for friends, or include it in their Xbox game soundtracks.

Music Mixer can help set the tone for any party by providing 2-D and 3-D background visuals of rave scenes, or interactive electronic visuals. Players can even use an hour of stock video footage to create their own compelling visuals. Music Mixer allows you to download photos, movies and music from the PC to the Xbox and set the slide shows to your favorite tunes.

In addition to playing groundbreaking games, with Music Mixer, players can now bask in the light of today's digital entertainment lifestyle from the comfort and convenience of their own living room.

Product Description

The Xbox Music Mixer lets your friends show off their singing skills, with this fun karaoke and freeform music tool!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Support terrible software, buy this game., November 14, 2003

By 

Patrick M Ellis (Redwood City, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Xbox Music Mixer (Video Game)

I made the mistake of purchasing the XBox Music Mixer. It's terrible. First, let me get the good points out of the way:

-Jpeg Decode is quite fast and the transitions are pretty good.

-Karaoke would be ok if the Mic didn't suck.

-When you do manage to view a visualization full-screen, they look pretty good. I suspect that they are just a port of some WMP vizualizers.

Now, the bad points, of which there are many:

* The Microphone doesn't work properly. You have to cup your hand around it and nearly kiss the thing to get it to pick anything up.

* When it does pick up your voice, there's a distracting delay.

I didn't buy it for the karaoke, so if these were the only problems, then I could deal with it. but:

* In order to transfer music or photos, you have to have a passport account to download the transfer tool. This is annoying and unnecessary.

* When you transfer music, it doesn't allow you to recursivley transfer directories.

* If you transfer mp3's, it takes forever to "prepare" the files for transfer, I suspect that it's transcoding them to WMA -- lossy on top of lossy != good sound. This is also the only reason they require WM9 installed on the PC.

* There's no reason they shouldn't allow you to just play files off of windows shares, over the network.

* The back of the box plainly states HDTV output, but it does no such thing. It puts out 4x3 480p which is definitely NOT HD. (Neither is anamorphic 480p which Microsoft also touts as HD -- liars). This is inexcusable. They really missed the boat by leaving this out and misleading the customer.

* Photos look like... garbage on this thing.

* The UI is non-intuitive and poorly designed. For instance, in order to copy files from the PC, you first have to prepare the files on the PC. Once that's done, you have 5 minutes to start the transfer to the XBox. On XBox you go to the import menu, where the only option is "PC". In order to rip songs from a CD, the natural place to do it would also be from this "Import" screen where there should be another entry, "CD". But there's not. You have to go to the music playback screen, somehow find your way to the "CD" and click the hidden-in-plain-sight record button.

* The "Rave" mode is interesting for about 30 seconds then it's just dumb.

* The Visualizers for the music are ok (probably just ported from WMP), but after you select one, it takes you back to the tracklist, which you have to dismiss with two button presses to get the visualizer full screen. If you don't like it, you have to start over.

* There's no way to browse the photos that you've uploaded on the box, only view slideshows. When you change settings during the slideshow, it restarts the slideshow.

* If you log on the Live to check for downloads, it has to reboot the XBox before you can resume using the XBMM.

So please, don't buy this thing. I'd rather not encourage the developers to keep making fourth-rate software.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, December 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Xbox Music Mixer (Video Game)

Yet again the Xbox's great hardware is underutilized because of shoddy software. But unlike the spotty lineup of games now its the Music Mixer which had the potential to be a useful utility for the Xbox.

The main problem seems to be that the people who designed this spent more time making "hip" visualizations of raves, then they did on the main reason people bought this: the ability to take your MP3 collection and put it on your Xbox.

The software that you download to your PC is not well thought out at all. First, you cannot select whole folders of songs (also known as Albums). So one spends a ridiculous amount of time trying to select each song. Then to add insult to injury not only do you have to select the files individually but the default folder keeps shifting back to one of those Operating System folders that Microsoft assumes you put your music in but noone does. The result ends up being neverending repetitive tasks.
Also the total amount you can transfer at one time is 100 songs, which isnt really a big deal because the software dumps the whole mess of songs into a giant master folder in the Xbox which you must sort ALL of your files again or send them in little batches. Either way prepare to spend something like a day of muttered curses if you plan to transfer your music.

Id save your money until they fix up this flashy but not really useful addition to the Xbox.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Decent Attempt, February 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Xbox Music Mixer (Video Game)

I bought this primarily for karaoke and playing music, and based on these two aspects alone, I felt was worthy of my 30 bucks. The software comes packed with 15 songs, and you can buy additional karaoke tracks online for $2 per song - which is a bit pricy, but they have a decent library of songs. Plus, you can strip the vocals of CDs and any mp3/wma's and sing along. The voice stripping technology is not perfect, you can still hear a little bit of the vocal, but it seems to do a very good job with most CDs I tried, though it does do a better job with cds than with mp3/wmas. The only thing is, the mic supplied with the software is of poor quality and you'll find your own voice barely audible when you record your performance. However, you can swap the mic out w/ either the xbox live headset or any mic w/ an quarter-inch jack. I have yet to try this myself and I imagine this could dramitically improve with a good mic - but again this adds cost to the whole package. The software supports two mic's and you can sing with a friend. I do agree with the other reviewers that the file transfer inferface is a bit clunky. However, if you are technologically up to date the win xp and windows media player requirement shouldn't be a problem. And as opposed to one of the previous reviewer, if your music files are tagged properly, when transfered to the xbox they are automatically sorted by artist, album, or genres. Plus, you can rip an audio cd directly onto the xbox harddrive. The thing that bothers me is the only file types supported are mp3 and wmas - which means none of the other formats nor any songs purchased from musicmatch or I-tones. Plus, you have to have the xbox on and music mixer loaded when transferring files from PC - so you have to have a crossover cable long enough to stretch from your computer to near your TV. If you can get pass that, the rest is very simple.

The xbox music mixer is the only software on the market that allows you to transfer music files from your PC onto the xbox - this is great for games that support custom soundtracks. Plus, the karaoke really is a blast, and you can program music or your own karaoke performace with RAVE visuals, and it also comes with a image viewer. It does have some flaws with its user interface and the included mic is low quality. But overall, for $30 or $35, this software really is worth the money.