argh923

I've owned both of these systems for quite some time, and never really cared about this until now, since I now have a kickass HT.

What I want to do is be able to stream all of my music from my computer directly to one of the consoles. I am not picky about artwork or anything like that, but I must have the ability to easily sort and find artists/songs, as well as create and save playlists.

Can someone help me out with A.) which of the systems will best do what I want, and B.) how to set everything up?

Rob V

Tversity.com has a cool program that is free and worked flawlessly with my PS3.

RichC2

It's extremely easy and works extremely well on both consoles, imo, it's a draw.

Load up Windows Media Player, share out your mp3 folders, and find it on your console.

Done.

InnocentBlood

how do i do this with iTunes and PS3 please?

Mordred

I'm assuming you're talking about using DLNA/UPnP for this sort of thing. I don't know about the 360, but for the PS3 there are definite problems, although many of them might go away if you have a wired connection between the two.

There is a delay between tracks on the PS3 when playing that is NOT minor. We're talking 5-10 seconds for each track. I also occasionally have gotten very short pauses while playing tracks. This might be because someone else was using a laptop to load a page or download something at the same time, but it definitely can happen. Also the PS3's streaming has to be done in either LPCM or WAV format. LPCM works much better, but you don't get song lengths.

I've experienced these issues with both WMP and foobar2000. foobar2000 (using the foo_upnp component) works better than WMP and displays album art (but it takes a while to load) on the PS3 when selecting tracks, but not while the tracks are playing. I should point out that the PS3s music heirarchy is total crap. It's very hard to find what you want easily. You can search by artist, but then all the tracks are lumped together (not by album) or you can search by album which makes it hard to find what you want if you've got hundreds/thousands of albums. Also, if you have a multi-disc album that has track numbering for each disc starting at 1, the PS3 will play it back as disc1track1, d2t1, d1t2, d2t2 which is obviously worthless.

I've got a TiVoHD and while it occasionally has problems with correctly determining the lengths of VBR mp3s (which can occasionally cause a freeze) it works 100x better than anything I've tried on the PS3. The TiVo has it's own software though, and I'm not sure if it's DLNA, so maybe that's why it works better.

sniper308

I've had no issues using TVersity and my 360's and doing so wirelessly.

Raul3

It works fine for me. For both consoles. I use WMP sharing and I'm wireless.

Lastblade

I second TVersity. Works like a charm while WMP didn't work for me (XP).

xmiyux

I have used the normal media sharing stuff of the 360 as well as sharing the media through Orb (which is also a free thing to run on the computer).

argh923

I'm confused by this. Why would I load Windows Media Player? I want to be able to play my music from the system, not from my computer. Am I misisng something?

DvDDan

no need to use any seperate program, just set media player to share with your xbox and you are done.

argh923

Again...why would I be doing anything with Windows Media Player at all? That's what I'm not understanding here. I don't want to mess with another program - I simply want my 360 or PS3 - whichever will display album artwork and all of that - to play MP3s on my computer. I don't want to have to load every single thing into another program first. Is this possible?

GoVegan

You don't need to load the other program any time you want to play music, but you do need something doing the actual sharing. Windows Media Player should work fine for music - anything in your library will be accessible on your console.

Tversity essentially does the same thing, but has more options for video - like it can take files your console wouldn't normally be able to play due to missing audio/video codecs and convert it so that it plays fine, and it doesn't alter the original file.

DJ_Longfellow

I use WMP to stream to both my 360 and PS3.
Background: Both system hardwired

- My 360 works flawlessly. I can load up all my tracks (about 400+GB of music)
- My PS3 will NOT see my folders. It always times out. If I search on PLAYLISTS, it will find those, but I would rather search by folder. I think the issue is sharing TOO much content at once.

Michael Corvin

FWIW, I use iTunes, now...

I have these same problems with MediaLink on the Mac. Also the track title doesn't seem to change until about a minute into the next song. Slightly annoying.

Mine times out from time to time as well, and/or takes forever and a day to load all the folders. I only have about 70GB of music.

I use 360Connect for the, well, 360 and it works flawlessly. Sorting and finding shit is slow and annoying though if you have a ton of artists to slog through. Fortunately it sees playlists so that alleviates some of that annoyance.

xmiyux

Because WMP is the simplest interface on the PC to tell your computer it is ok to share out the folders with music to the 360. Once you have it setup to share then you can just play everything from the 360. You will not have to open up WMP each time.

I don't know if i explained it clearly. Hopefully it made sense.

sracer

I've tried various times to stream from my pc. I end up going back to the old standby old-school approach... a 1TB USB harddrive directly attached to the console.

sniper308

Do some reading... here's a number of choices:

Info on Tversity:

http://tversity.com/

More info about it at http://tversity.com/screenshots/ and

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/arch...0_tversity.cfm

Info on Playon:

http://www.themediamall.com/playon


Some media center info for 360:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro.../extender.mspx

WMP and the 360:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...tepbystep.aspx

xmiyux

To that list i will also add Orb:
http://www.orb.com/

argh923

Couple of questions, then...

#1.) Wouldn't I need to add songs to WMP's library every time I rip new ones? Not really something I'm looking to do...I figured I could just share the folder and be done with it.

#2.) How are the original files altered?

argh923

Thing is, I want to avoid using a seperate program for this if at all possible. I was under the assumption that these weren't necessary. From the sounds of the quoted poster in my last post, the best I can get is WMP, and that's just to share the folders.

sniper308

The 360 and the PS3 are just media extenders. You have to use something to share the media. WMP, Tversity, etc are just media server software that installs on your PC and run in the background. If you have a media center PC, I guess you don't need any of the software, although I suspect it still uses WMP under the covers. They don't alter the original media, and all you need to do is setup the media server software to scan the folders where you normally put media anyway.The it catalogs it in its library, which I suspect is just an XML file, for the most part. Its not much different than an itunes type of software, etc for the most part, except generally not as invasive as iTunes. In addition these software packages provide the ability to decode some codecs that the 360 for example can't handle natively (if you use something other than WMP).

If you would do some research or read some of the links, these answers are quite apparent.

edstein

WMP is your best option. Follow the "WMP and the 360" instructions above. Once you share your library you don't need to run WMP again unless you want to add new music. Then just use WMP to rip your discs. The PS3 will see these files as well. Be advised that file sharing is a resource hog on the PC. Another option would be to put the files on a seperate portable hard drive or thumb drive and plug that directly into either system. You don't need to alter the files at all. Both the 360 and PS3 can sort by artist, album, song, etc. If you have a lot of files it does take a while for the 360 to sort through them all.

sniper308

Agreed. Never used it, but hear its good.

sniper308

Generally I think its the decoding aspect that seems to be a resource pig in my experience.