ok, anyone have a clue what might be going on here, or has anyone else tried this?

I have a 500gb external USB HD that has all of my flac and mp3 files on it. When the drive is plugged into my desktop computer, I can stream BOTH formats to my 360 with Tversity and windows media player, and they both play fine.

However, if I manually plug the usb drive into my 360, the only files I can play are the mp3's... the Flac files don't even show up?

I am heading to Vicksburg MS for 4 weeks tomorrow morning and really wanted to bring my music collection along with me (even if that means listening to it through tv speakers at the hotel)

The only laptop I have is a laptop from work and they have recently removed our authority to install anything, so I can not install a player that supports FLAC, or even install the plugin that allows WMP to play FLAC files...

Any idea why the flac files will play on my 360 over the network but not directly through the usb drive?

I will probably bring a stack of CD's with me if need be, but I don't want to bring a lot.

Xbox does not support direct play of FLAC. You must convert to MP3 to play directly or use Tversity to compress/encode and stream over a network.

The reason is that your 360 doesn't have the FLAC decoder built in. When you stream over the network, your 360 is receiving the already decoded audio.

Unless your work laptop is really locked down, it should be possible to install a FLAC player on your external drive and run it from there. Foobar2000 has a Portable Installation method that will keep all the files it needs in one folder. Just plug the external drive into your home computer and install Foobar2000 onto it using that install method. You should then be able to run it while it's plugged into your work laptop.

Peenerhead, as of the last dashboard update (i think) you do not need to convert to mp3. Before the update my flac library would not play from my xbox, but now it will (only over the network as mentioned)... but yeah I guess your right there is no direct play support for it.

Peter: I didn't think about the decoding issue... good point. Expalins why files won't play directly as peenerhead mentioned.

on our work computers we all have absolutely no rights to install or uninstall most anything.. amongst MANY other restrictions on our work computers (don't get me started!)

Hell, even if you go to the control panel under add/remove programs you can not even remove any programs! they even somehow managed to block the use of USB flash drives (including cameras, phones, ect.) b/c they say there is some virus that people were spreading from flash devices. They did NOT block external usb hard drives with non-flash based memory though so I am in luck... maybe

Anyway, As long as I don't have to run an installation .exe file from my laptop then I think that it might work though... will give it a shot.

good news! got Foobar to run on my work laptop using the portable installation method as described. Thanks Peter!

Hmmm.... now should I order a set of audiobytes and have them shipped to the hotel?

I will bring the speakers that I have up at the office for my desktop as a last resort.

Thanks for helping me figure this out peter!

Glad I could be of service. There are worse things in the world, but I'd say not having access to your music can be a pretty serious bummer.

FYI:

I am posted up in my hotel room at the hampton inn listening to some john mayer from my portable hard drive. Thanks again peter! This will make the 26 nights I have here go by much faster (along with with my ps3 and 360).

Also, this hotel is incredibly nice, better than most other hamptons. They have free booze from 5-7, so I am heading down to grab another beer.

Tunes and free booze? That's not a hotel. That's 2/3 of paradise.

26 nights? That might be tough regardless of your diversions.

yeah tell me about it...