Morning Post

Rise and shine kiddies, it's Thursday!

So I spent a good bit of last night tinkering with the Music and CD copying feature of my Xbox. I've had my Xbox since early October '04, and I never bothered playing a CD in it. The cool thing about the Xbox is that since it's presently the only console with a hard drive, you can copy stuff to it, which includes CDs.

Now Microsoft wants to prevent piracy, so the Xbox only works with legit CDs (writable CDs and CDRs won't work apparently, though I haven't tried), but you can copy that whole CD to your Xbox and set up custom play lists.

Nothing ground breaking of course, but it's nice since I don't have a CD player in my room, and of course after copying you don't need the CDs. The audio quality is very good, and it has some visuals that play with the music (since your TVs on) akin to Windows Media Player.

So far I created a Lord of the Rings play list and copyed the entire trilogy's sound track to my Xbox. At present it's the largest file on my HD, with Halo 2 coming in at a close second (due to the size of the Bonus and Killtacular Map Packs I downloaded off Xbox Live), coming at at around 12, 800 blocks. I'm not sure what a block translates into, however the Xbox Dashboard states that there's over 50,000 available (I think), and with everything I have on there I've never seen it dip below that.

I believe the Xbox has an 8 GB HD.

Certain games also support custom playlists and let you play your own tunes while you play. I haven't tried this yet, however I only have one game that supports this, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Seeing as how the game already has the same sound track I just copied, I should probably try something else.

Anyway, anyone interested can probably find more info under the support section of the Xbox web site.