Xbox Music or Spotify for Lumia 830?

[SaltedSquirrel7]

Hi everybody!!

I've been debating changing the way that I listen to music, and at the moment are in the process of uploading my old iTunes collection to OneDrive which my Laptop with W8 and Surface 2 will see. The problem however, is that my L830 does not and I am wondering if it is worth changing this.

I am tempted by Xbox Music as this will fit in with my devices naturally however I wanted to know what other's experiences are using this on a day by day basis? Is Spotify a better alternative - looking at this however I find it a little confusing looking on WP8.1. I also cannot use this on my Surface Alternatively, am I better building up a collection and syncing manually to the phone.

I cracked in a 128GB MicroSD card in my phone as I like to keep an offline copy for when I have no signal!

Any advice is much appreciated!

 

[Stephen Pedersen]

I have a subscription for both of these services. Both are great in different ways. Spotify has a larger music selection and it's much nicer to discover music and make playlists on. However, to just play music I enjoy the x box music app better for locally stored music and only use Spotify for playlists. Additionally,I only make the playlists on my PC, which in turn I can then play them on my Spotify app. It's just much nicer to navigate Spotify on the PC. The x box music app, on the other hand is quite easy to navigate with. Something to note is that you can't manage your locally music collection on Xbox music on your PC. You can only do this on your WP. Another cool option that x box music will acquire is one drive music streaming. I'm not sure when this will become a reality though.

Do you have any further questions?

 

[SaltedSquirrel7]

Thanks for the response. The main reason for me along its that I keep seeing people criticising the Xbox music app, and Spotify seemed to be quite popular, but I was unsure of the WP app and the fact I can't get it on Windows RT.

I am looking forward to getting the music locker functionality though s this means I could keep anything not in the catalogue, so I will probably take on Xbox music for a month or so and see how I get on!

Thankyou!

 

[Bobvfr]

I have a lot of time for Xbox music, but it does need a bit of thinking through some of the options before adding your local collection, we now have three accounts with Xbox music pass in our household working across 11 devices since I took my pass out a couple of months ago, and all are working well, I have about 1500 local songs and over 1600 from my music pass and the whole lot integrates well and also works on our Xbox One.

I admit I don't use playlists and haven't tried Spotify but from my experience Xbox Music is a really good system.


PS One of our devices is a Surface 2 so running RT.

 

[SaltedSquirrel7]

Cool, thanks guys!

I also don't use playlists, I tend to add albums to my collection and play as/when I feel like it, although I should probably try and learn new ways of using the system to try and make it better for myself!

I only wish that Xbox Music on the phone had higher resolution images for certain artists. Some pictures look truly horrendous.

 

[paulsalter]

A good way of using playlists on it if you have a portable device that you want to use offline
Create a playlist, and call it something like 'Phone Offline'
Go to the settings of this playlist on the phone and turn on the option to keep playlist offline

Now when you add anything to this playlist from any device, they will be downloaded for offline use on your phone

 

[SaltedSquirrel7]

Thanks for that.

I was actually looking at Spotify today on WP and I'm not sure if this is the same as other platforms, but the only way to transfer your library appears to be creating playlists on the desktop and then copying these across.

Xbox Music however appears to be a better solution for Windows as a platform but seems to be missing a few things I would have hoped would be there. It's not make or break as such and the OneDrive music locker would certainly help a lot...

I don't think there are really too many alternatives other than CloudMuzik but that means using a Google Service. I am not opposed to this as such, more Google's reluctance to support Microsoft platforms - which really only affects the consumers at the end of the day, but that's another rant!