Uploading / Simulating a Collection of Songs on the Windows Phone 7 Emulator

Question

I am writing a windows phone 7 game that deals with extracting the spectrum out of a song and building the game level based on that. The only problem I have so far, though is that I cannot use any song out of the Zune media library, because there aren't any on the emulator. I do not have a device yet. I downloaded an unlocked build of the emulator, which has more apps, including zune, but when I open Zune, it seems to be empty.

Can I somehow upload or simulate (add songs to the medialibrary at runtime) a song collection so that I can test the game with the emulator?

P.S. I think that there's a tool that let's you sync your device to the Zune client on the PC, but I'm not sure whether it will work with the emulator.

Please, help.

Answer 1

No you can't sync between your PC and the emulator.

I, however see 3 songs available in the emulator by default though.
You can access them via the MediaLibrary.Songs collection. Simply add a reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework (Yes, even if you've got a Silverlight based project.) and you're good to go.

using (var myMediaLibrary = new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media.MediaLibrary())
{
    foreach (var song in myMediaLibrary.Songs)
    {
        songList.Items.Add(new TextBlock {Text = song.Name});
    }
}

You must have the RTM version of the tools though as they weren't there in the Beta or CTP versions.