Xbox Music Mixer is a strange combination of media player and karaoke machine, and while it’s main purpose seems to be karaoke with it’s included microphone, the terrible amount of songs available make it simply seem more of an attempt to provide Xbox users with a media player. Even in this respect it is rather lacking, as there are some features that should have been included but are completely overlooked.

The karaoke function has a total of 15 songs from all kinds of artists including the B-52’s, Madonna and the Village People, and a few typical party songs like For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and Auld Lang Syne. The microphone, which has a cartridge that links to the controller with a standard 1 ¼ inch audio plug feels very light and plastic, mainly because it is, but it works well enough. If you really wanted to you could use a more professional microphone, and you can even hook up the Xbox Live! headset for duets.

Whilst the 15 songs are barely adequate, Live! functionality comes into play for downloading new visualisations and Xbox Karaoke packs. The packs cost about A$13 and are charged to the credit card you signed up with. Alternatively you can go to websites such as xboxkaraoke.com and pay for individual songs. You download these and use the PC to xbox transfer tool found on the Xbox.com website. There’s an advert when you start the included karaoke songs to visit chartbusterkaraoke.com and this implies you may be able to play normal karaoke discs as well, but I never got to try this out. There’s also a range of about 40 songs that you can use for the Music player side of the software, but they’re really quite average, and you won’t know the words to them.

However, you can put your own music CDs in and the Xbox to sing along to, utilising the inbuilt audio compression to tear out the vocals and sing along without lyrics. Whilst this is adequate, it’s no better than what can be done with computer programs such as Soundforge, and it’s not so good for more modern music that no longer uses the middle range to record vocals, and tends to deaden the overall sound. Obviously the words will not come up, but the Xbox will display album, artist and track information if it is hard encoded onto the disk. Now, here’s where the Music Mixer misses the boat – why not use the Live! service to look up track and title information? Given Microsoft’s Media Player 9 series for PC does this, surely the Xbox could.

The Music Player suffers the same problem as the karaoke in that it doesn’t look up the CD information. This is fine for some CDs that include the information, but keying in title and artist information via the xbox controller is a royal pain in the rear. The saving grace here is that if you have a PC that connects to your xbox, you can transfer files from your computer hard drive. On the PC you can name the tracks and artist using whichever ripping tool you use, and then transport the files using the aforementioned transfer tool available at Xbox.com. The downside to this is you need to have a PC running Windows XP, but I found the actual transfer to be rather painless. Even the router that screws up some Live! games for me didn’t have a problem recognising the Xbox and transferring the data across. However, the Xbox re-encodes the data, most likely to a WMA format, so for some MP3s downloaded off the internet there is a loss of quality in some cases.

The visualisations are as good as you’ll find with any PC media player, and include the usual strobing circles and fractals and even a 3D “rave” with different dancers. Many of these are interactive, and you can play around with the controller to get different effects. You can transfer photos from your PC using the transfer tool, and they can be shown as a slide show to music as well. An advanced music player comes in the form of “Rave” mode, where you can apply audiovisual effects in real time to CDs and audio already on the Xbox. Whilst fun for a while, as you can apply whacked out filters and scratches and so on to music, as well as becoming a virtual VJ, the fact that you can’t upload your own sound effects, scratches or video severely limits the fun you can have. Furthermore, the fact that you can’t transfer video at all is a serious oversight, as how cool would it be to watch all those game trailers and stuff like Red Vs Blue on a television via the Xbox!

Conclusion:
The Xbox Music Mixer seriously misses a great opportunity to turn the Xbox from a games console into a multi-media entertainment device. The ability to transfer music files from PC to Xbox easily is it’s only real saving grace, and is really worth the purchase if you have a large MP3 collection and dig listening to custom soundtracks, or if you listen to songs via your home audio-visual set up. It’s great to fire this up and whack it on for background music at a party. However, the lack of being able to transfer video, the inability of it to find title, artist and track information, and the lack of karaoke songs included on the disc sour it almost to lemon status.

Pros
+ Can transfer songs from your PC to Xbox easily
+ great for putting on in the background for parties
+ Karaoke is also great for parties
+ some really cool visualisations, with the ability to include your own pictures.

Cons
– only 15 Karioke songs included
– the other included songs for music player and rave mode are really average
– Can’t transfer videos for either visualisations or just simply watching
– doesn’t utilise Live! to look up artist, title and track information
– Need Windows XP to transfer files

Score: 60/100