How can I add music to my Xbox 360?

"I'm having a party at my house and I want to use my Xbox 360 to play music through my home theater. What do I need to do to add music to my Xbox 360?"

While you can copy music to your Xbox 360 hard drive by ripping CDs or transferring MP3s to the Xbox 360 hard drive, you can play music through whatever speakers your Xbox 360 uses without taking up valuable disk space with the music. I would suggest a couple of other alternatives intstead.

Stream music to your Xbox 360 from a computer
If your music collection is on your computer, it makes more sense to connect your Xbox 360 to your computer over the network, rather than copying songs to two places. You will need to enable sharing on your PC in order for your Xbox 360 to see it (the computer also needs to be turned on). From here you can then browse the contents of your PC on your Xbox and play music over your home network.

Connect a USB drive to your Xbox
The other easy option for playing music on your Xbox is to connect a USB drive with the music. Using any open USB port on your Xbox, simply connect the drive, which can either be a thumbdrive or a hard drive. From there you can browse any available music and build a playlist to play it back.