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Xbox Music Mixer Review - Hardware

13th January 2004 by
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Love shack, baby love shack! No I've not gone entirely mad for the B52's; that was a long time ago. Simply put, I'm practicing for my debut on the karaoke scene with Xbox Music Mixer. No longer is it a requirement to be half drunk in a seedy old pub to pump out some serious karaoke numbers or to be over the age limit to make your way into a place that offers such entertainment. Xbox Music Mixer brings karaoke to the households of all who have the ambition to become one of the singing greats, just needing some quality time in front of the microphone in the privacy of your own home!

Features

The Xbox Music Mixer is much more than a karaoke device, but primarily it is certainly that. Aside from the obvious Music Mixer it brings a package of useful and some less useful features that can turns the buyers opinion around from being a non-karaoke to thinking it would be a useful piece of equipment.

  • Karaoke

A chance for the less gifted musical performers to have a crack at making it big in their own world, the karaoke capabilities of the Music Mixer are definitely the main aspect of the software. Hitting all the notes you can have single sessions or have duets with the range of different songs available to sing-a-long to.

You're given sixteen karaoke songs to start with and have the choice to either download songs from Xbox Live service and paying the premium content price of $13.99 and getting four songs which I think is an absolute outrage, or you can use the data transfer option to transfer your own mp3 files and strip the lyrics to create your own karaoke tracks, the only downside with this method is there are no words.

There is content online available to download for free but it's not very good, and there are some cheap visuals in the visualization section. Over Christmas time they had a lot of Christmas themed content but it was all premium content excluding one karaoke favourite for the festive season 'Jingle Bells'. For what you pay you really don't get much in return. $14 for four songs doesn't seem like a fair trade, more like a highway robbery but it's the price you pay when you have friends around and they want to sing the classic 80's karaoke songs!

The songs you start with have a good variation to them from your old classics like the B52's to your more modern material like Jimmy Eat World or the Moulin Rouge hit song Lady Marmalade. Just a word of advice, do not try and sing the Lady Marmalade song; it is filled with uh's and oh's that make it nearly impossible and sometimes can sound highly inappropriate.

  • Interactive Media Player

The media player is where a lot of the action happens; you can listen to your imported music, put your music into separate groups for example genre and also prepare your music for the sweet sounds to ... (continued next page)

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