Well So much for the Zune

My Zune was DOA. It tried to charge up and for a few minutes it was but then it just died.

I can't get it to power on or charge.

So it's getting retruned

Now as far as other media options. I want to get all this music off my computer and on to something where I can listen to it all over the house.

I could get an external hard drive and hook it up to my 360. Is that hard?

I was thinking of building a media box but that seem expensive.

Ipod is out of the question.

What other options are out there? I can't find any other MP3 players that are 120+ gigs.

 

if your 360 and PC are on a shared network, you can stream them from your PC to your 360.

 

Yeah, I have a 300 GB external drive with just music. My 360 can access the files over my network. The 360 has a decent enough interface for organizing the music. My 360 is hooked up to my Denon surround sound system via the optical cable in my living room. Sometimes when we have poker nights the TV acts like a jukebox.

 

If you care about your music (or any of your other data), don't have it in just one place. You need multiple redundant backups, or sooner or later, you'll lose it all - HDDs are prone to die without warning and you won't be getting anything off them if they do.

 

Yeah that's why I'm making DVD-R Backups of everything even before my dead zune arrived.

I've come to the conclusion a good MP3 player doesn't exist. if my large storage options are Zune or Ipod.......then yeah.

 

"Mine broke therefore none of them are reliable."

That makes sense...

Eh, I'll be getting another iPod soon. My last one was working great when I sold it, and I kind of need a different player since I cracked the screen on my Zen (not on purpose).

 

Just return the Zune and get a replacement. It's not like the 360 where they just die all the time. I beat the shit out of mine and it's still fine.

And when you buy shit like that you gotta let it charge completly before using it.

And do what Henners said, stream from your PC to the 360. Thats what I do for everything.

 

I think I'm going to wait until 120 gig MP3 players are standard the most there seem to be are 32 gig players. As far as streaming to my 360 Don't I need media center to do that?

 

We've had our 30GB zune for 2-3 years now and it's worked great. We have a 20 month old baby so it's had it's share of mishaps...

 

Zune/iPods out now are 120GB and all you need is WMP11 or Zune software. So basically if you have Windows your good.

 

no, all you need is vista an the latest windows media player.

 

windows XP can do it too, no need for Vista

 

If at first you don't succeed.. Fall to the defeat of the gods of instant gratification and wait for an inevitable upgraded version.

 

I set up mine through XP about 2 years ago and it was a pain in the ass. It was one of those things where I fooled around with the settings for a couple of days and couldn't get it working, then suddenly it started working on it's own one day. Vista is supposed to be a lot better for stuff like that.

You're right about the hard drives....the part I didn't mention was my old hard drive crashing about 6 months ago. Since my first MP3 player got stolen out of my car that meant it was the second time I'd lost everything. I still have some music on another hard drive but after losing everything twice I just decided to sign up to Napster for $18 a month and stream everything. You can transfer easily from Napster to Zune. The files will keep playing as long as you have a monthly subscription. I ended up buying an iPod which won't work with Napster, so I had to buy software that cracks the Napster DRM so I could transfer songs to my iPod. Another stupid hoop to jump through, but at least I'm not manually ripping all of my old CDs for a 3rd time...

 

really? I got mine set up no problem. In fact, at a LAN party I had where we had abotu 16 xboxes, i enabled everyone to use my filesharing. It was streamlined with an update apparently.

Go to WMP, libray - more options, media sharing. Activate your 360. I think you have to have your 360 on while you do this.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/pcsetup/xpsp2.htm

 

Usually this has to do with wierd crap with uPnP. I've had this problem randomly with all sorts of media, never makes sense to me, but it's usally always uPnP related.

 

My 360 won't show up on media sharing in WMP11 with XP. That was the original problem and it looks like it's not showing up again. I reformatted XP about a year ago and I think that's when I lost my settings. Since my HDD crashed I never bothered setting it all up again. I remember having to change my XP settings after hunting around on the internet for a day or so, and even then it didn't immediately work.

The connection is good for streaming music, but not so good for video. The 360 will only stream WMV files. Instead of spending 100+ hours converting all of my DVDs I just chose to skip it....

 

It will play Divx AVIs also Eric.

 

Yeah, since last November I think, you can download an optional media update to play xvid/divx and mp4 and some other crap.

 

Another reason not to buy a Zune

http://forums.zune.net/403986/ShowPost.aspx