Wii Transfer
01.26.07 / 12:01AM / Joe
Daring Fireball turned me on to a new little app called Wii Transfer, which purports to accomplish one of the items outlined in my famous Wiish Liist a month ago. In fact, it follows one of my suggestions so closely that I must be pre-cog. Or these needs are so basic that every Wii owner in the world wants to see it happen. From my request list:
"[The Wii] should be able to find MP3s on my iMac and play them. It should be able to send save files over to the computer for backup. It should be able to share pictures and movie files."
Wii Transfer does all of that. Here's me listening to the Lightning Seeds via the Wii:
What it does is, it sets up a teeny web server on your Mac, with a barebones navigation system... you then browse to that LAN address on the Wii's web browser. You see all of your music (arranged by artist - not playlist - because it's just peeking into your songs as organized at the HD level), you can play one song, play all songs on a particular album, or shuffle all songs on a particular album.
This pretty much kills the need for AirTunes, or even physically jacking an iPod into the home entertainment center. Computer-based music now on your lovely stereo, without any old-tech middlemen.
Well, it would, if it worked.
I know it's just a $9 piece of amateur software hacking, but it is super flaky. In fact, before the 2.1.1 release, it barely worked at all. Now, I have about a 70% shot that any given song is going to play. Which I don't exactly consider a success at $9 spent. Here's hoping that it will expand and grow some stability.
I have no idea what causes the 30% failure rate... sometimes I click a song and it just does not play. The progress bar may look like it's loading; no play. It may load for a bit and then stop; no play. It may never show a moving bar at all; no play. (It doesn't always show the album artwork, either.)
I will note that any songs purchased through the iTunes Music Store simply don't exist in Wii Transfer. And - perhaps taking my request too literally - it only sees MP3s. So anything encoded in AAC or otherwise will not appear.
Wii Transfer jumps into iPhoto as well, displaying no-frills slideshows of whatever album collections it sees. This seems to work well enough, and certainly beats shifting files over to an SD card if you want to turn your Wii into a picture kiosk.
I have not tried the game save backup and movie playing features. The movie transfer thing is limited to using SD cards, though, not the WLAN... so it's not like you'd be doing a ton of that anyway.
It's a good idea, folks. Just needs a couple more $9 to fully bake. | 
