I am always looking for new and different ways to use technology to consume media, and today a friend introduced me to a great way to bring together two proprietary technologies from competing companies.
I recently bought an XBOX360 because I wanted to Rock Band, and with the pledge of weekly downloadable content releases, my PS2 just was not going to cut it. So I broke down and made my largest "gaming" purchase in, well, ever. Since then, I've acquired three wireless controllers and a bunch of games, including Burnout Paradise, a driving game that encourages you to smash into things and drive off of ramps at ridiculous speeds. It's great fun and offers pretty fantastic online multiplayer action.
One interesting feature of this game is that while driving around Paradise City, a "radio" plays in the background. You are able to change the track, but the game obviously has a limited number of tracks, and only a handful of them are good. This made me want to find a way to play my own music while tearing up the "city" instead of what the game had to offer me.
I already knew from the first incarnation of XBOX that you can replace the game's music with yours, but the problem is that all of my music lives on a Mac. Microsoft makes it possible to stream from PCs running a Window OS, but not from Apple computers. Since I wouldn't really need to install Windows for any other reason, I thought I was stuck with the included music forever.
Today, however, my friend told me about Connect360, a program from Nullriver that costs $20, lives in System Preferences, and enables streaming from Mac to XBOX360. Quite frankly, it was easier to get the computers connected than using the Windows capabilities with a PC. Now, I'm streaming Bebel Gilberto—I am not playing the game, I'm working, this is not driving music—from my work MacBook on the couch to my XBOX360 connected to the stereo. And it works incredibly well.
Now if I could just send data from my XBOX to Last.FM...
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