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Music
Connecting your Computer to your Living Room
Overview: Learn how to stream Music, Photos, and Video from any computer to your TV using your video game console.
This is the second article in a three part series on Sharing Files Between Any Devices in your Home.
- Part 1 - Share Files Between All of your Computers
- Part 2 - Stream Computer Media to the TV using Video Game Consoles
- Part 3 - Sharing Between your Smartphone and Computer
Consoles, Not Just for Gaming Any More
Seeing your vacation photos or your favorite podcast on a 50 inch screen is way more enjoyable than being holed up in your computer room. How about having your favority playlist pumping through your surround sound system at your next party?
There are numerous ways to accomplish this; some complicated and some simple. If you have a Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, or a Nintendo Wii, you already have the easiest way of getting your media from your computers to your living room. Let’s take a look at how to make it happen.
Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is a great option for bringing your computer media into your living room.
Xbox 360 to Windows
Right out of the box you can get media from your Windows computer to your Xbox. Here are the basic steps:
- Turn on your Xbox 360
- Install Windows Media Player 11 on your PC
- Turn Sharing on in your Library (Library> Media Sharing> Share My Media> OK)
- Select your Xbox from the list of sources.
- Go to your Xbox and go to Media> Media Type (Photos, Music, or Video)> Computer> Browse for file
Here is an excellent tutorial from Cnet on using an Xbox 360 to access the media on your Windows computer. Bonus – they also show you how to pull media from your Microsoft Zune to your Xbox (assuming you’re one of the five guys who bought one).
Xbox 360 to Mac
Just because Xbox is a Microsoft product doesn’t mean that you can’t use it with your Mac. You can use Nullriver’s Connect360 software ($20)to do the same thing as Windows machines. Connect360 automatically indexes your iTunes and iPhoto libraries and shares them to your Xbox 360. You can then use the Xbox 360 Dashboard to browse and play your media, organized in the exact same way that it is on your Mac.
Here are two excellent tutorials on using an Xbox 360 to access the media on your Mac.
Mac to Xbox 360 with Connect 360
Xbox 360 and Mac (This one covers a bunch of other cool things between a Mac and Xbox 360)
Cheapskate tip: If you want to save $20, try some of these free alternatives to NullRiver’s Connect360.
Xbox 360 to Linux
You can even do the unthinkable; connect a Microsoft product to a Linux computer. (Somewhere a Linux snob just felt a stabbing pain in his side.)
Here are two excellent tutorials on using an Xbox 360 to access the media on your Linux computer. (One from the command line, the other using WINE.) Enjoy!
How To Share Media Between Xbox 360 and Linux
How to Connect XBox 360 to a Linux PC
Extra Credit – Install XBox Media Center on your Console
Your Xbox does some cool stuff right out of the box, but when you add the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) application it gets really interesting. Here is the description straight from the XBMC.org website:
XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media.
While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your HTPC. Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.
You can find the installation instructions in the very thorough XBMC online manual.
NOTE: Setting this up can be pretty tricky, so if you’re looking for something a bit less complicated stick with the instructions for your operating system above.
Sony PS3
Sony PS3 is the Cadillac of consoles; BluRay player, stunning graphics sexy piano black finish, you know you want some. Of course it can do more than just play games and DVDs. You can connect it to a computer running all three operating systems too. In fact, DigitalTrends.com has a very thorough set of instructions that walk you through the entire process(es) of using your PS3 to connect to a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer.
Sony PS3 to Windows
The PS3 can act as a DNLA (standard for sharing media between devices) Player that will display media content from a computer set up as a DNLA Server. Windows Media Player 11 will act as your PC’s DNLA Server.
Right out of the box you can get media from your Windows computer to your PS3. Here are the basic steps:
- Turn on your PS3
- Install Windows Media Player 11 on your PC
- Turn Sharing on in your Library (Library> Media Sharing> Share My Media> OK)
- Select your PS3 from the list of sources.
- Go to your PS3 and click the Search for Media Servers icon with the X button.
- You will see your shared media which you can navigate through with your PS3 controller.
Here is an excellent tutorial that will show you how to set up streaming from your PC to your PS3.
Sony PS3 to Mac
You can set up Nullriver’s MediaLink software ($20) to stream from your Mac to your PS3 by installing it on your Mac and going to the System Preferences panel.
Click the MediaLink icon to see the configuration options.
Set up your sharing/streaming options here and close the window.
Go to your PS3 and click the Search for Media Servers icon with the X button.
You will see your shared media which you can navigate through with your PS3 controller.
Cheapskate tip: If you want to save $20, try some of these free alternatives to NullRiver’s MediaLink.
Sony PS3 to Linux
Once again, you can do pretty much anything on a Linux machine. If you’re willing to get your hands dirty at the command prompt, that is.
Here is a tutorial that shows you how to configure streaming from Linux to the PS3.
Nintendo Wii
While Wii is definitely the most fun video game console, it is also the weakest multi-media device in the roundup. There are, however a few clunky hacks that will allow you to get media from your computers to you TV using a Wii. Still, if your only console is a Wii, then try some of these tricks. If none of them float your boat, head on over to Wii Media Center to see the new tricks that they are constantly devising.
Nintendo Wii to Windows
Lifehacker.com has a set of instructions that will show you how to use internet media sharing software Orb to stream media to your Wii over the internet (not your home network). It’s not the most elegant thing, but watch the video below to see how it works.
Since this really just uses the browser, it would also work fine on an Xbox or PS3.
Nintendo Wii to Mac
Riverfold has the Wii Transfer application available for free that will allow you to stream media to your Wii using the Internet Channel (browser) too.
Nintendo Wii to Linux
MaximumPC has a good tutorial that will help you set up your Linux machine to stream to your Wii.
Extra Credit Connect a Computer to your TV
Sure, you can use your video game consoles to stream media from your computers to your TV, but why not cut out the middle man? You can buy a tiny, silent computer and place it in your media cabinet. Then, hook up Boxee (Windows, Mac, and Linux), Plex (Mac only), or MythTV (Linux only) and grab some popcorn.
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7 Best Community Driven Online Music Services
The Best Music Services Part 4
One of the things that makes online music services more interesting and useful than your iTunes library is the aspect of a Music Community. Not only can you hear good music, but you can connect with friends and others who share your tastes. This allows you to socialize about your favorite artists and see what others think and listen to. I get a lot of suggestions for new music from the people in my online music communities.
This is the 4th article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:
- The Most Reliable Online Music Services
- Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
- The Best Music Discovery Service
- Best Community Driven Online Music Services
Let’s take a look at the types of community and social networking that each of these services offeres. (P.S. If you are interested in sharing musical selections with me, there are links at the bottom of the post.)
Community Features Comparison
iLike.com – iLike is allows you to share your music tastes on Facebook, Orkut, Bebo and hi5. Using the iLike application, you can add music to your profiles, be alerted to concerts and new releases by the artists you enjoy, see what music and concerts your friends like, and communicate directly with your favorite artists.
Community Quality Despite my many disappointments with iLike, the Community features are actually very solid. In fact, they’re probably the only reason to use this service. (4 Stars)
Rating: 
At least they got something right.
Jango.com – Allows you to share music with friends and tune in to their selections.
Community Quality : The sharing features are decent, but pretty basic. (3 Stars)
Rating: 
Ok, but nothing special.
Last.FM – This is another area where Last.FM shines. There are numerous ways to connect with other people the site and many popular social networks. They also include forums and groups that you can join. You can pump your listening activity out to places like Facebook, Twitter, or your blog in real-time.
Community Quality : You can connect with anyone, anywhere, on any network from Last.FM. (5 Stars)
Rating: 
If you’re a social networking addict, this is the service for you.
MyStrands.com – They have a bunch of ordinary stuff here, but nothing special. This is probably the only feature that doesn’t suck on this site.
Community Quality : OK, but still not enough to make me use this craptacular mess. (3 Stars)
Rating:
Pandora.com – You can share playlists with your friends, but that’s about it.
Community Quality : This is the only disappointing feature of an otherwise amazing music experience. Maybe that’s why I like it, it’s simple. (2 Stars)
Rating: 
If you don’t care about community, this is definitely the best service out there.
Shoutcast.com – Nothing here that I can find.
Community Quality : It’s just radio as far as I can tell. (1 Star)
Rating: 
Man I have to make the Zero Stars image already.
Slacker.com – Nothing here either. (aside from great music)
Community Quality : Not for the Web2.0 crowd. (1 Star)
Rating: If your boss says that you’re not a team player, give this service a shot.
The Best Music Discovery Service
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
If I want to hear all of my favorite songs, I can just listen to the “My Top Rated” playlist in iTunes. One of the real values of a good online music service is the ability to turn you on to good new music that you DID NOT know about.
These days I find just about all of my bands from suggestions on my favorite services. Let’s take a look at how our players stack up on the issue of Music Discovery.
Music Discovery Comparison
iLike.com – They give you the option of seeing “New Music from Your Friends”, “New Music from Your Favorite Artists”, or “New Music from People with Similar Taste”. These are some good ways to find good new music.
Music Discovery While there are many less-than-great things about this service, iLike does a decent job of showing me good music that I have not heard before. (4 Stars)
Rating:
Jango.com – When you build a playlist, they start to suggest other artists that are similar to the ones you have selected. You can leave them alone to hear them occasionally, add these artists to the mix to hear them often, or delete them so you never hear them. Usually I’ll add artists that I don’t know to give them a listen. If I don’t like the, I just delete them later on.
Music Discovery Again, I always seem to .
Rating:
Last.FM – I’m not exactly sure how Last.FM determines which new artists to play for me. I’m also not sure that they’re any good at it either. Whenever I select the “My Recommendations” option I never really like what I hear. However, when I select the “My Neighborhood” option, which plays favorites of people with similar taste to me, I usually do like what I hear. Does that mean that the masses are smarter than them? Probably.
Music Discovery Their suggestions are actually not that good, but the “Neighborhood” ones help me find some decent new music occasionally. (3 Stars)
Rating:
MusicStrands.com – Yet another thing that they suck at. I’m starting to wish I had just left them out of this series all together.
Music Discovery Pure crap. (1 Star)
Rating: Only because I don’t have a zero stars image.
Pandora.com – Pandora uses some scientific mumbo-jumbo to find music that you’ll like. They constantly mix in “new” music with the songs that you already like using this algorithm. I’m not quite sure how it works, but boy does it ever!
Music Discovery This is where Pandora leaves everyone else in the dust. They never fail to amaze me with the mix of great songs that I have heard and great songs from artists that I usually like. At least half of the cool new music that I’ve found in the last two years has come directly from Pandora recommendations. (5 Stars)
Rating: I wish I could give them more than 5.
Shoutcast.com – Shoutcast is just a collection of online radio stations. Your odds of finding good new music are only as good as the station that you pick.
Music Discovery I’m not really that into how Shoutcast works, but I guess you could hunt around and find something worthwhile. (3 Stars)
Rating: Decent, but not for me.
Slacker.com – Slacker gives you plenty of options to adjust your stations music selections. You can stick with more “familiar” music or go for a mix of “newer” artists. This generally helps you find lots of good stuff that I did not know about.
Music Discovery If I’m in the mood to find a lot of good new music I can make Slacker send me a mix of mostly new music that I tend to like. (4 Stars)
Rating: Nice job!
Have Your Say
Well, you know what I think, let’s hear what you think. You can select more than one choice below if you have a tie for your most reliable service.
Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
Give the People What they Want
The best reason to use any of these music services is to have them send you great music. There are many different ways of determining what “you” will like. They all seem to straddle the line between art and science with a touch of voodoo thrown in. I have spent a lot of time trying to get a stream of good music out of all of these services. Let’s take a look at my mixed results. (Don’t forget to give your feedback in the pole and comments below.)
Suggestion Quality Comparison
iLike.com – They base their selections on your iTunes history and favorites of other members with “similar” tastes.
Suggestion Quality They do a decent job of sending you songs. (3 Stars)
Rating: Good, not great.
Jango.com – Jango stations play the artists you add, along with similar artists favored by other Jango users who share your taste.
Suggestion Quality : I generally like the selections along with the ways that I can modify what it sends me. (4 Stars)
Rating: Very good.
Last.FM – Last.FM allows you to rate songs up or down and favorite songs that you love. You can also tag songs that you listen to. It also pulls your iTunes data to determine what you like.
Suggestion Quality : It does a very good job of selecting music that I like. (4 Stars)
Rating: Very, very good.
MyStrands.com – When you go to the My Recommendations page it shows you a bunch of songs based on your play history in iTunes. The recommendations are not really that great.
Suggestion Quality : This is just another disappointing feature of MyStrands. (2 Stars)
Rating: Not good!
Pandora.com – Pandora lets you rate songs up and down and bookmark (favorite) songs and artists. It is very quick to put together a batch of songs that I just end up liking. They base their picks on the Music Genome project, which uses data entered by music “experts” to indentify what makes music similar.
Suggestion Quality : This is where Pandora really shines. It just keeps picking one great choice after another. (5 Stars)
Rating: It’s not perfect, but it’s the best.
Shoutcast.com – Shoutcast is really just a collection of radio stations. It’s a straight one-way push. They do have a ton of stations to choose from, so you can usually find something you like, but it does not adapt to you in any way that I can see.
Suggestion Quality : There are no suggestions. You just hunt around and hope you like what you find. (1 Star)
Rating: Hit or Miss.
Slacker.com – The web player and iPhone players both allow you to rate and bookmark songs that you like and dislike. After doing this for a while, you get a pretty good flow of songs that you like.
Suggestion Quality : It takes a little while to fine tune, but it does send you a nice mix of songs based on your feedback. (4 Stars)
Rating: Very, very good.
Have Your Say
Well, you know what I think, let’s hear what you think. You can select more than one choice below if you have a tie for your most reliable service.
The Most Reliable Online Music Services
Who Can You Count On?
One of the most important features of a streaming music service is reliability. All of the other stuff doesn’t matter much if the music keeps stuttering and dropping out or the site’s navigation flakes out all the time.
How Am I Rating this Category?
Interface and Navigation – How clean and usable is the interface? Can I quickly get into my playlists and stations? Does everything work; quickly and without hiccups?
Streaming Quality – When I click Play, what happens? 1 or 2 seconds, then music or do I get hypnotized watching a loading graphic? Does one song flow smoothly into the next or am I stuck in the waiting room?
How Did I Test?
I already use some of these services a lot, but I gave each one at least a half hour on my Desktop (Ethernet cable), Laptop (Wi-Fi) and my iPhone (over AT&T’s lousy 3G network). Let the games begin…
Reliability Comparison
iLike.com – I used to use this service a while ago, but I needed to go back and reacquaint myself before I could render judgment.
Interface and Navigation In a word, iDon’tLike. The interface is just a mess. It takes too much work to figure out how to get a simple song to play. Then, when you click the wrong thing, you get this shuffle mode that only lets you listen to 30 seconds of a song before skipping to the next one. Huh? (2 Stars)
Streaming Quality: Once you figure out how to work iLike, the music streaming is great and the audio quality is also. Not much to say here other than good job. (5 Stars)
Rating: Could have been better if not for the crappy interface.
Jango.com – I dabbled with Jango a while back and generally liked it. Let’s see how it fares against the rest.
Interface and Navigation : Jango has a decent interface that allows you to figure out things pretty quickly. It does not have all of the features of a Last.Fm, which is exactly how they help keep the interface under control. Very nice! (4 Stars)
Streaming Quality: Songs play quickly and jump from one track to the next very quickly (aside from the occasional commercial). The audio quality is also crisp. (5 Stars)
Rating: Jango has a nice mix of straight forward interface and solid streaming performance.
Last.FM – I use Last.FM just about every day and really enjoy it a lot.
Interface and Navigation : Interface is not Last.FM’s strong suit. They have so many powerful playlist, social networking, and music discovery features that it gets a little overwhelming. Still, it’s not as bad as iLike or Slacker. (3 Stars)
Streaming Quality: When you finally figure out how to get a song playing, it sounds and works well. At times, I do catch the occasional slow down, probably due to the huge amount of members that could be tuned in at a given time. (4 Stars)
Rating: If they did an interface design they could easily break into the 4 Star group. Still, I really like this service.
MusicStrands.com – About 2 years ago, I loved MyStrands (MusicStrands?). Since then, they seem to be making serious efforts to destroy the service. I think that they are trying to replace it with Strands or something. Whatever!
Interface and Navigation : The site is a mess. Everything is disorganized and a mystery. (1 Star)
Streaming Quality When it works, which is rare the streaming is OK. (3 Stars)
Rating: This service needs to take a long swim in the dead pool.
Pandora.com – I listen to Pandora every single day. On my Desktop, Laptop, and iPhone. I love it!
Interface and Navigation : This is absolutely the service with the fewest features of the group. Somehow, they make that work for them though. This has the cleanest, simplest, slickest interface of the entire gang. (5 Stars) If you’re listening Last.FM, please rip off their design approach.
Streaming Quality The streaming quality is excellent. Every now and then there is a pause between songs, but it never seems that bad. (4 Stars)
Rating: Bravo!
Shoutcast.com – This actually stream other online radio stations through it’s player or your favorite desktop player. It is owned by WinAmp (AOL), so it integrates best with that player.
Interface and Navigation : The interface is easy enough to get used to. Pick a Genre, then Sub Genre, then a Station. (4 Stars)
Streaming Quality: Fast and Clear, not a whole lot to say there. (4 Stars)
Rating: Pretty good with tons of choices.
Slacker.com – Slacker is also a collection of online stations that you can customize. They sell their own player that you can download your favorite songs to.
Interface and Navigation : Slacker has a simple player that lets you select from a bunch of online stations. Even simpler than Shoutcast; Select a Genre, then a Station and it starts playing right away. (4 Stars)
Streaming Quality: Songs play right away and come in loud and clear on my computer or iPhone. (5 Stars)
Rating: I really like Slacker.com, especially on my iPhone.
Have Your Say
Well, you know what I think, let’s hear what you think. You can select more than one choice below if you have a tie for your most reliable service.