Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Microsoft gets burned by their own playbook:

If you play "Project Gotham Racing 3" on an Xbox 360 after the console hits stores later this month, Microsoft invites you to use tunes straight off your iPod as an alternative to the game's sound track.

Officially, the company says the new console can stream music from just about any MP3 player. But during a preview of the next-generation console in San Francisco last month, Microsoft execs talked up the interoperability between iPods and the Xbox 360.

"When you plug your iPod in," Xbox digital-entertainment executive producer Jeff Henshaw told CNET News.com, "the Xbox 360 automatically detects that it's there. You can browse by artist or album or genre or by custom playlist."
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However, because of the iPod's digital-rights-management software, the Xbox 360 cannot stream songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store, Henshaw said.

I almost feel bad for them, being an also-ran in a field where their own lobbists have driven them into a hole and having to work around someone elses proprietary technology. But not really.

At any rate, digs up some guy who is nomnatively the creator of iPodCopy

"The trick is finding the right files," Benson said. An iPod "scatters the music files across random directories and renames them, so they're really hard to find."

iPods have a database that cross-references the location of music files and their names so users can select them through the device's menu. Microsoft would have had to include simple software in order to engage that database, he said.

"They have to read that database to get a list of songs on the iPod and present that to the user," Benson said. "Once a user has selected what song to play, then you use the database to find the song and play it."

Bullshit. You have to have the iTunesDB file in tact for the iPod to play tracks. However, if you just want to play them from another device that the iPod is slaved to, simply crawling the directories and reading the ID3s will work just fine. Yes the files are named weird, but all of the information, including album art, is still attached to them.

I assume since this guy has actually worked with iPods, he has some kind of clue that the XB360 wouldn't have to do anything more than mount the iPod as a drive and craw it. This smells to me of a CNet reporter just getting it horribly wrong.