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Great for all you American Idols

For E3, Microsoft revealed its Xbox Music Mixer. As the name implies, this software facilitates music, but not video. Basically, the Xbox Music Mixer turns your Xbox into one gigantic MP3 player on steroids. At its very core, the Xbox Music Mixer is just an over-glorified version of WinAmp, which makes the product’s $39.99 MSRP seem a little ridiculous. It does come with a microphone, however, which gives way to the start of the over-glorification. Yes, the Xbox Music Mixer can turn your game console into a karaoke machine, though we were thankfully spared of any demonstration of the microphone in action throughout Microsoft’s demos. The final product will be shipped with over a dozen karaoke songs for you to start singing to right away, but the neat tricks come in when you want to start singing to your own favorite tunes. Included in the software is a special filter which attempts to remove the vocal track from your music files. Also thanks (or no thanks) to the built in hard drive, users will be able to record and save their performances for playback later.

This Xbox rep demoed the Music Mixer comprehensively.

All the functionality of a half-decent MP3 software for the PC is included in the Xbox Music Mixer. All playlist and playing functions are controllable with the standard Xbox controller. The software package will also ship with a CDDB-like listing where it will automatically recognize a CD and assign the appropriate filenames to each track.

While that’s all fine and dandy, the real surprising part of this package is how, for the first time, the Xbox and PC will start to work together. With this software, Microsoft will allow users to connect their Xboxes to their computer via the network cable to directly transfer MP3s over. For those who deem that as too much of a hassle, you are also given the option to load MP3’s directly off a CDRW disc with the files burned on it.