I’ve looked up the instructions on how to do this and it seems quite straightforward. Here’s what you do (I’m assuming both your PC and your XBOX are on the network already and you’re using a pretty recent copy of Windows)

First of all you need to set up media sharing so that you can share music and other digital media with your Xbox 360. The following steps describe how to set up media sharing in Windows Media Player 11.

To set up media sharing in Windows Media Player 11

• In Windows Media Player 11, click the arrow below the Library tab, and then click Media Sharing.
• In the Media Sharing dialog box, select the Share my media check box, and then click OK.
• In the list below the Share my media to check box, click your Xbox 360 , click Allow, and then click OK.

Now to play music streamed from your computer on Xbox 360

• Using your Xbox 360 controller, select the media blade.
• Select music.
• Select Computer.
• On the Windows-based PC screen, select Yes, Continue.
• After a few moments, your computer with the shared media name should appear.
• Under Select your computer, select your computer and the shared media name.
• Find the music that you want to play, and then select Play.
• The music streams from your computer to your Xbox 360.

There you go, not terribly different and regardless whether your music collection contains latest hits or tracks used Acoustic Guitars you’ll be able to stream them to your heart’s content!

Hi there, there are a number of these around, but I have come across one that’s free and should do everything you wanted to do. It’s the Audio Phonics Guitar Tuner and using proprietary pitch recognition technology, the program can find exact notes in less than 50ms latency. The recognition technology also adapts to the speed of the processor for smooth tracking. The program is easy to use, good looking and best of all it’s free. A must-have for anyone learning the guitar. Check it out!

The latest version of iTunes has made it slightly more difficult to burn music CDs even though it can do everything except clean your bathroom sink. I suspect you chose the Back Up to Disc option from the Library submenu on the File menu. This creates a backup of your Queen album, but not in a format that a normal CD player will recognise.

To make a music CD you must first create a playlist containing the tracks you want to burn. Click the “+” button at the bottom left ot the iTunes window and give your playlist a name (example Queen). Now click Music and drag the relevant album or tracks from the list in the middle of the iTunes window and drop them onto the new playlist. Now right-click the playlist and choose Burn Playlilst to Disc from the pop-up menu. Finally, check that the options in the Burn Settings dialogue box are as your want (the default are usually fine, but make sure “Audio CD” is selected) and click Burn.

I got this question from someone responding to the post about musical characters in Word. There are a number of packages on the market that can help you do this, but most of them can carry quite a hefty price tag. Pizzicato for example, can cost anything between $20 and $500 depending on which version you decide to go for. Finale, an excellent product costs $600. However, there’s also a free version of Finale called Finale Notepad. It doesn’t have the same functionality, but it’s perfect to create your own scores with, and they look excellent when you print them out.

Here’s a quick tour showing how it works. You can either dive straight into it, or use the wizard that helps you get on your way even quicker. Step 1 involves giving a title to your composition and specifying what print size the score is going to be.

Step 2 is where you specify exactly what instruments your score is for. You can select just one instrument, or different orchestra sections. I told you it’s quite comprehensive.

The next step consists of specifying you key signature and time signature for the score. The wizard is pretty simple to use and walks you through all your options.

And voila’, you score is ready for you to populate:

The software then lets you add your own music to the score, and then print it out. There are a number of toolbars that lets you annotate the music, add notes, rests and whatever else you might want to add to it.

If you’re into music, just go ahead and download it, load it on your computer or laptop and have a play.

The first thing you need to realise that whenever you’re looking for free music, you need to keep in mind issues like copyright and make sure that the you are always using a legal source for your files. It’s too easy to join a torrent network and download a pirated album. But there are also other sources where you can download your music from.

One of these, for example, is MP3 Rocket, an application you can download which gives you access to 12 million songs with no download or per song fee an in a format you can hear on your computer, your iPod or wherever you wish. The files come down from a network called Gnutella which allows people to share music, videos, applications and any other sort of file they wish.

One thing to note is that the free software will keep asking you to upgrade to the paid-for version. The Nag screens aren’t too annoying though. I downloaded the free version and have been using it for around a week downloading classical music and the files it downloads are just fine.

Just one word of caution with this method. MP3Rocket provide you with a mechanism to download files, however the files come from any one of a number of people around the world. Please make sure you’re always running a virus scanner on your machine as there is a real possibility that you could download a file with a virus attached. There’s a particularly nasty Gnutella virus around that mimics one of your free music downloads and entice you to pull it down. Most virus scanners will pick this up though, so as long as you have an updated one you don’t need to worry about it.

Here’s a small trick that will help you. Word uses a system called Unicode to represent characters in a document and will automatically figure out how to display characters if they don’t exist in the current font. If you want the 3 characters you mentioned here’s how to do it:

• For a flat note: Type 266d and then press Alt-X
• For a natural note: Type 266e and then press Alt-X
• For a sharp note: Type 266f and then press Alt-X

It works very nicely, all you need to do is remember the Unicode values of the characters you want to display.