Being a geek, I play Xbox games a lot. Being a music lover, I often want to listen to my own music while playing. Being the right sort of geek, my music is all lovingly arranged in iTunes on my Mac.
Windows people have it easy with Xbox. They install the Windows Media Sharing service, make sure WMP knows about where their music's kept and it just becomes available to play on the Xbox. I had assumed that us Mac users were excluded from such fun, but then I came across Connect360.
Connect360 is a simple enough application to use. It installs into your system preferences and lets you share music from iTunes, photos from iPhoto and movies from disk. The configuration is simple - you can allow/disallow different Xboxes and it will sort out your Firewall settings for you on the fly. The first time I tried to play an AAC file the Xbox had to go to MS to get an updated codec, but aside from that no additional setup was needed on the Xbox - the mac appeared as just another source.
The overall experience is excellent. I can drop into the Music menu on the xbox in-game and select which tracks to play, without exiting the game. The games detect when music is being played and drop out their own in-game music but leave any important sound effects playing (at least, this has worked on all the games I've tried.
Less important to me but worth noting is the fact that iPhoto pictures are easy to navigate and come across really well on a big screen. I experimented a bit with the Movies sharing, it suffers slightly from the fact it shows the video files' filenames rather than reading any metadata like itunes does, but files of formats the Xbox supports played fine across my 100baseT network, even some HD stuff. It's certainly a viable option for someone who wanted to play videos on their TV and already had an Xbox - my only criticism would be that MKV files are not supported but I expected that's something MS would have to address.
There is a trial version available that's limited to sharing 100 songs, which is a good idea to try out if you're worried about your particular network setup and want to check it'll all work. Overall for the $20 licence fee Connect360 does what it claims to and does it well.
