The X-Box Music Mixer is undoubtedly one of the most innovative ideas that has come out in the last few years. The emphasis is to turn your X-Box into a multimedia machine that will allow you to turn your living room into a dance club, karaoke bar or a homey environment in which flipping through traditional photo albums is passé because you can display all of your digital photos on your TV accompanied with music of your choosing to set the mood.

It comes packaged with a microphone to allow you to have a tr...e Karaoke experience. The disc itself has 15 Karaoke tracks that range from standard Karaoke fare – Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York to current classics – Lifehouse’s Hanging By A Moment and Len’s Steal My Sunshine. The microphone takes some getting used to as you have to hold it quite close to your mouth to get any sound out of it. That being said, once you get the hang of it, it works really well. The lyrics are displayed on the screen and light up in time to indicate when you are to start demonstrating your vocal expertise. To make the experience better, you can ever record your performances and share them with your fans. You can also import your favorite songs and remove the vocals so that you can improve on the original – but you have to provide your own lyrics. The problem is the vocals really aren’t removed but rather some of the dynamic range is removed to tone down the vocals. However, this also changes the sound of the song itself. To get the true Karaoke experience you can download new songs, at a price, from the Internet. I tried to browse what was offered through X-Box live but consistently got a message that stated “No new content available.” That might be because I’m in Canada and there may be copyright laws or something which precludes me from downloading from the Internet (this is apparently the reason why one can’t download songs from the popular iTunes store from Apple). So I checked out the website – www.xboxkaraoke.com and found to my surprise a huge amount of songs to download. However, be aware that it will cost $2 per song download. As far as karaoke goes despite these setbacks it is still pretty fun.