whats the deal with WP8 music player?

sticitodaman

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I have yet to upgrade my lumia 710 to a windows 8 phone, mostly because I was waitng for the right device and I think its here (lumia 925 t-mobile). But I didn't realize that windows phone 8 doesn't have the zune music player app?! Is this true? One of my top priorities for my next smartphone is a solid music player app and I have been using a zune device since 2008. I'm still rockin the zune hd. How does the windows phone 8 xbox music app differ from the old zune app? Can you still sync music to your phone for local playback or is everything streaming from the cloud? What is local playback like? I see alot of complaints about music playback on WP8 and I don't understand exactly how it works. I just need the basic zune player with the ability to play my own collection without any sort of internet connection. thanks
 

kamikaze80

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No Zune. No idea why no replacement yet. Connecting Xbox Music to the internets messes up your metadata, so don't do that if you've tweaked the metadata on your music collection.
 

SeeVuPlay

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I also still have my zune hd and still using it daily. Xbox music is not bad...it does the basic music playback you you are looking for. I have music locally stored, ut since my phone is only 16 g, I only put about 200 songs on there
 

spaulagain

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I have both a WP7.8 and WP8 device. I find the "Zune Player" and "Xbox Player" pretty similar on a day to day use. I still use the Zune desktop app to organize my music because it kicks *** at it. But I have no problem with Xbox Music on my phone. And the Windows 8 Xbox app is getting better all the time.

Both the phone apps are pretty similar.
 

feeked

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Honestly my biggest complaint is the live tile. I liked how Zune music showed the last played artist, not just while currently playing. The current tile looks abrasive on the start screen
 

sticitodaman

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Ok so as far as local mp3's go its basically the same music player? Thats nice to know because NO other mobile media player compares to the zune interface IMO. Can I use the zune software to sync to wp8? I read it didn't support wp8 but maybe I misunderstood. If not, how do you sync from PC to phone?
 

spaulagain

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Ok so as far as local mp3's go its basically the same music player? Thats nice to know because NO other mobile media player compares to the zune interface IMO. Can I use the zune software to sync to wp8? I read it didn't support wp8 but maybe I misunderstood. If not, how do you sync from PC to phone?


Zune desktop does not work with WP8. I have all my music on an external HD plugged into my computer. I use Zune Desktop to organize and correct any data errors with the music files. Then I have Xbox Music on my Windows 8 PC pull the music from that folder structure managed by Zune Desktop.

Xbox Music then handles the synchronization for devices.
 

dmmontal

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- Visually and interface-wise, the Music app on WP8 is nearly identical to that of Zune / WP7. The underworkings are different however.
- While you can certainly continue to use Zune as a media player / manager on your computer, you will not be able to sync anything to your WP8 device using Zune. They are not in any way compatible.
- You have several options to get your local music onto a WP8 device (none of which work remotely as well as simply being able to sync from the Zune software): You can drag and drop the files onto the phone using file explorer. Or you can sync using the WP8 Desktop Sync App or WP8 Metro Sync App, both of which are rather bare-bones and not very intuitive.
- You may run into issues syncing playlists created in Zune if using either of the WP8 Sync Apps. For instance many of my Zune playlists will sync but come up with zero songs, or many of their songs missing. I have had to install iTunes and keep duplicates of all my Zune playlists in iTunes, because the sync apps (at least the Desktop Sync App) does not come up with these errors using iTunes playlists.
- There are options to stream from the cloud and sync playlists across your devices. However enabling these cloud options will also overwrite any user-generated metadata on your music with XBox Music's own metadata, which will often mean erroneous tracks names, artists, artwork, split albums, etc.

I also owned a Zune HD for many years, and was very sad when I realized how poorly XBox Music on WP8 performs in comparison. For a long time I carried around two devices - my WP8 device as my phone, and my old WP7 device as an MP3 player. After a while I just gave up and have settled for a much more inferior music experience with WP8. If you are coming from the same set up, you may be disappointed.

You may wish to check out the Master List Of Issues With XBox Music On WP8 thread on the Microsoft Community Forums, which covered many of these issues, and which was eventually shut down by Microsoft because it grew too large:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...c-on-wp8/b1c64834-de43-4af6-8069-4626090289a3
 

garak0410

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- Visually and interface-wise, the Music app on WP8 is nearly identical to that of Zune / WP7. The underworkings are different however.
- While you can certainly continue to use Zune as a media player / manager on your computer, you will not be able to sync anything to your WP8 device using Zune. They are not in any way compatible.
- You have several options to get your local music onto a WP8 device (none of which work remotely as well as simply being able to sync from the Zune software): You can drag and drop the files onto the phone using file explorer. Or you can sync using the WP8 Desktop Sync App or WP8 Metro Sync App, both of which are rather bare-bones and not very intuitive.
- You may run into issues syncing playlists created in Zune if using either of the WP8 Sync Apps. For instance many of my Zune playlists will sync but come up with zero songs, or many of their songs missing. I have had to install iTunes and keep duplicates of all my Zune playlists in iTunes, because the sync apps (at least the Desktop Sync App) does not come up with these errors using iTunes playlists.
- There are options to stream from the cloud and sync playlists across your devices. However enabling these cloud options will also overwrite any user-generated metadata on your music with XBox Music's own metadata, which will often mean erroneous tracks names, artists, artwork, split albums, etc.

I also owned a Zune HD for many years, and was very sad when I realized how poorly XBox Music on WP8 performs in comparison. For a long time I carried around two devices - my WP8 device as my phone, and my old WP7 device as an MP3 player. After a while I just gave up and have settled for a much more inferior music experience with WP8. If you are coming from the same set up, you may be disappointed.

You may wish to check out the Master List Of Issues With XBox Music On WP8 thread on the Microsoft Community Forums, which covered many of these issues, and which was eventually shut down by Microsoft because it grew too large:

Master List Of Issues With XBox Music On WP8 - Microsoft Community

Thanks for that link. I noticed they closed the thread. XBOX Music is still a mess and could drive me to Spotify. So far, no real word on how Windows 8.1 (and WP 8.1) will fix this huge list of problems.
 

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