Apple iPod

XPlay: Making it Work With Windows

The iPod is clearly an impressive product, but many out there must be wondering why a Macintosh only product is being reviewed on a site like AnandTech. Our whole office is PC based and with exception to the Apple IIe sitting on the floor of our lab for old times sake, not a single Macintosh computer resides in our ownership. Well, as we hinted at before, the iPod is not only for Macintosh owners any more, thanks to a company named Mediafour.

Mediafour was founded in 1994 and has based their company off a much used product called MacDrive. Initially released in 1996, MacDrive brought cross platform computing to the masses. MacDrive allows Windows based PC owners to access Macintosh based disks and files from within Windows. For years, after continually making improvements to their MacDrive product, Mediafour had been looking for other applications to which they could apply MacDrive technology. The release of the iPod was just the opportunity they had been waiting for.

Ever since Apple's announcement of the iPod, Mediafour had been hoping that their MacDrive software could serve as the backbone PC iPod software. Although Mediafour is on good relations with Apple, it was not until the public launch on November 10th that they were able to get their hands on an iPod and see what they could do. They were pleased with what they found and confident that they could bring PC compatibility to the iPod.

The XPlay team, which consists of 4 people, has been working feverishly ever since. XPlay is based around the MacDrive software, but is unique in the way that it interfaces with the device. Although XPlay uses MacDrive technology to read and write to the iPod's HFS+ file system, many new aspects had to be added in order to make the iPod recognize that the MP3 files on the device actually contained playable music. On top of this, Mediafour had to develop a front end by which the user can copy files from their PC to their iPod. While talking to the company, Mediafour was quick to note that XPlay is not MacDrive in a new package.

The tricky part with getting the iPod to work on a PC was not getting the device to be recognized by the computer. All that is necessary for communication with a PC is a powered IEEE-1394 card, which can be found for as little as $20. In general, the tricky part was getting the iPod to communicate with the HFS+ file format on the iPod and making it properly recognize MP3 music files.

As mentioned before, MacDrive allowed the communication link with the HFS+ file system. One major area where XPlay differs from MacDrive is in its ability to write to the iPod's database. The iPod stores ID3 tag information in a database. This database, which contains at least title, album, track, and artist information, is not composed of text lifted from the ID3 tags. Rather, the ID3 tag information gets interpreted and stored in the database in a way that is intuitive to Apple's iTunes software. Figuring out how to write this information to the database properly was crucial to getting XPlay working properly. It is for this reason that the first technology preview of XPlay allowed for files to be written to the iPod but music files could not be played on the iPod itself (since the iPod's database did not show that the songs existed).

XPlay is currently on technology preview 3 and many advancements have occurred along the way. XPlay is now rather functional, allowing the user to copy music and data to the iPod using either a Windows explorer namespace or Windows Media Player version 7. We were quite impressed with the intuitiveness of the software, as well as how well it was able to interface with our iPod. After a quick install, we had music on our iPod in less time than we thought (thanks in large part to the firewire connection).