Is Xbox Music on WP really this bad?

[Chris Senn]

Ive used Xbox Music on my PC before. Its pretty good. Easy to maneuver and request songs. Figured Ill try XBM on my WP since hey they are both windows.
And wow

First you get about zero option (maybe it is actually zero) if you dont pay for anything. So I paid.

The playlist created on my computer refuse to play on my WP saying there is an error.
Out of the 4 songs Ive had Shazam/Cortona listen to 3 could not be found on Music library and the other 1 says I dont have streaming rights and I must buy the song.

Storing my Mp3s on their cloud is pitiful as well. It doesnt want to store anything it doesnt recognize, whether its because they dont have the song in their library or because the tagging system is atrocious.

It has no discover music option based on your preferences.

I honestly dont see myself using this app ever again.

 

[D M C]

I'll not say bad but its actually the worst music player.

It takes 22 secs to launch to play music

 

[Bobvfr]

I just tried this, I made sure Xbox music was not in memory by closing it, so starting from the Xbox tile it took THREE seconds from clicking it to actually have sound of the now playing track to come out of the speakers.

Edit:

Just thought I had better test this again, turned phone off, turned it back on an waited 30 seconds after the tiles screen was up to let it settle.

Clicked the music tile choose a track out of recent plays and the music was playing in four seconds as it took an extra second to choose a track.

Second Edit:

Ok I thought I would try a harder test, XBM out of memory, click tile, choose artist, choose album, click on track and this time I managed to slow it down to 5 seconds.

God knows where you are getting your 22 seconds from.


Bob

 

[Chris Senn]

OK had to like restart all my computers and phones lol now its streaming. It really seems not to want to use the cloud for some reason. But ya interface sucks still. Took me a few minutes to figure out how to search music on WP Music app. It kept wanting to search my collection only.

Any tips on ways to import playlist from Google Music to Music?
Maybe slacker would of been a better choice

 

[R Robin]

For me, its working great. Donno why people still complaining about music app.

 

[dpaynewp]

Hi all, I've seen alot of comments about how poor Xbox music is on windows phone, and I have experienced some minor glitches as well. However I have to say that for the most part it has worked very well for me. And that is across my desktop, laptop, surface, iPhone and Lumia.

However - I do not use previously ripped tracks at all anymore - in fact since I have moved completely away from the iTunes store I do not purchase music anymore, don't have to manage all the files on all my devices and even archived all of my old mp3's.

I am totally using xbm as a streaming service and have to say I love it as such, I have had no problems with play lists - I can be in any one of my devices, add music and it is available right away on any of my other devices.

Long story short as a Streaming Service I have really grown to appreciate it.

 

[Bobvfr]

Ive used Xbox Music on my PC before. Its pretty good. Easy to maneuver and request songs. Figured Ill try XBM on my WP since hey they are both windows.
And wow

First you get about zero option (maybe it is actually zero) if you dont pay for anything. So I paid.

The playlist created on my computer refuse to play on my WP saying there is an error.
Out of the 4 songs Ive had Shazam/Cortona listen to 3 could not be found on Music library and the other 1 says I dont have streaming rights and I must buy the song.

Storing my Mp3s on their cloud is pitiful as well. It doesnt want to store anything it doesnt recognize, whether its because they dont have the song in their library or because the tagging system is atrocious.

It has no discover music option based on your preferences.

I honestly dont see myself using this app ever again.

XBM works fine for me, but you do need to take a bit of time to figure out a few things, and the biggest issue is the matching of local music, this option should come with a BIG WARNING instead of the little write up it has.

I have copied all my local music (CD's I have ripped to MP3's) to my SD card on my phone, I also have a XBM music pass so now about half my albums are XBM and they sit alongside the local songs I have.

A good part of my local music collection isn't available on XBM unless you buy it and I ain't buying things twice, for example I have all the Led Zeppelin albums, if you try and match that with XBM you end up with one track not 8 albums.

So never turn on "Match my local music to the cloud" option on your PC unless you know what you are doing.

Apart from that I have had a really good experience with XBM, I have a desktop PC, laptop, Surface Pro a 1520 and an Xbox 1, if I add music to my collection on any device the music is synced across all devices (I do have one additional step on the phone in I have to click download), this is all then available to play offline.

I am going to buy my wife a music pass for her birthday next month, she has a 520, Surface 2 and laptop, we have tried XBM on her phone and it also works well and this is a budget phone.

I haven't had any problems with Xbox Music, in fact I would say I have been delighted with it, but it does need a bit of thought before you add all your collection to it.

Got to admit I am not a playlist user, I tend to play albums, although I am going to make a couple of playlists (One on the XB1 and one on my laptop to see how they work, I will make them with a mixture of local and music pass music).


Bob

 

[dlalonde]

I've been one of the most critical of the app. But the last few updates made it actually pretty good. It's not the best around, which remains the iPhone music app in my mind (gapless playback is a must). But it's comparable to the stock music app on Android 2.3.x. which did what it's supposed to do: play music.

The rest is icing on the cake (bar gapless playback which is must like I said). The live tile, recent plays, etc. Those are secondary as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Desynthesis]

Until they fix the 'cracking' problem between songs played off the phone (to a normal audio out, not earbuds), yeah, I couldn't say it's good yet.

It was one thing back when Xbox Music had the same stupid bugs that other music players had--poor information presentation, bad ID tag reading, etc. But the music cracking? That's unique and pretty poor.

 

[mmmuffin]

I do see performance issues when moving between song tracks, but in general I love Xbox Music and it's the only streaming service I use now. The phone app is a bit difficult to navigate, but as another user said, once you know your way around it's fine

 

[corey_blackstock]

the cracking sound is caused by a bug in WP8.1.. not the app. Luckily, after updating my phone to Cyan, the problem has gone.

 

[FAHMI BASSEM]

Yes it's

 

[rafaldo]

As a non-streaming user (all my music, tagged by mp3tag and transferred to my 64 GB SD card on my Lumia 1520), I can say the app has improved from the atrocity it was when it was first released.
However, having experienced what it was like as a Hub in WP8.0, it's so difficult to like and use it as it is now. The speed is nowhere near acceptable, it's not optimised for 1080p (tracks and album names are huge and take up so much screen space) and there are little niggles (no recently added, albums not ordered by release year, no gapless playback) that really hinder the experience.
So for now I am still using Music Hub Tile but hopefully XBM will continue to improve. It really needs to.

 

[980z]

The app has become pretty usable for me after the regular updates. It's not the best there is, but I hope that things might improve gradually.

 

[paulsalter]

I quite like xbox music on WP, does everything I need from it, plays local music and music downloaded from music pass, thats all I need on my phone, load app, start music and listen
my only issue is it's stopped syncing with the cloud, not sure if this was the latest update or the fact I am on the DP

xbox music on desktop though is pretty poor for me, need more music management options and the cloud matching fixed (I have matching off now because it constantly matches to wrong albums or screws up double albums)

xbox music on WP = thumbs up for me
xbox music on desktop = thumbs down

 

[Bobvfr]

I think a lot of this is down to how you use Xbox music (Given it is doing a lot of things and used in so many ways by so many different devices) and where you have come from, for example if you have a massive local music collection, are used to spreadsheet/data base style interfaces, or don't have touch screen devices.

I can honestly say I am more than happy with the overall Xbox music set up, but I do see why there is confusion, and for some, some heavy duty hair pulling out.

But I think a lot of this comes down to not understanding Xbox Music and how it works before jumping in with entire collections etc.

In an earlier post I said I don't use playlists, maybe this is an age thing, I just play albums so put on an album and listen to it as originally published by the artist, but last night I made up a small playlist to test some issues, I will do a new post on it and put a link here when I am done, it has a couple of interesting results......

http://forums.windowscentral.com/xbox-music/313629-playlist-test-answer-another-thread.html



Bob

 

[paulsalter]

I do agree with Bob on that last post

For what the service does and how everything links together (mostly) it is very good and works well
I might be in that age thing aswell, I just listen to albums
Playlist for me (until they broke) where a way of getting music pass content locally on my phone, create a play list called 'Phone Offline' and have this made to auto download on the phone, add things to this from the pc and then they download on the phone without doing anything

Overall it is good, but I would like to see more features added to the desktop side

 

[Bobvfr]

I think you hit the nail on the head, Xbox Music like Windows 8 was almost too much of a radical jump for a lot of people, I somehow managed to miss Windows 7 and Zune, and was ready for the jump to touch screen devices, yes it felt like jumping into the unknown with no safety net and maybe at some time I said "Sod it lets just do it" and it worked for me.

Maybe like the rumoured Windows 9 doing more for non touch screen users Xbox Music could have a dual way of looking at life so a more "old fashioned" way of presenting music lists with more options for control but still have the modern graphic view for those that like it because lots do.

But one thing is for sure, no point in wanting the past, Xbox Music has to live in the present and future with touch screens and cloud functions, we maybe need to catch up and think a bit differently :smile:




Bob

 

[EngDreams]

runs very fast on my 930, around 3-4 seconds to open up and start getting into music, my playlists all work fine on desktop, phone and xbox. All over i love the radio feature and the videos coming up when available. Having seen this from birth what is there now is a good solution but it still grows and updates often so it is also constantly getting better.

 

[Desynthesis]

the cracking sound is caused by a bug in WP8.1.. not the app. Luckily, after updating my phone to Cyan, the problem has gone.

You're very fortunate--so far, you're the only person I've heard who Cyan has fixed that bug for.Are you sure you're not streaming music, or listening to it through BT rather than direct audio?

I don't think it's WP8.1, considering Pandora and other Music apps don't have this problem. It's most likely Xbox Music. I wish it weren't the case though.

But one thing is for sure, no point in wanting the past, Xbox Music has to live in the present and future with touch screens and cloud functions, we maybe need to catch up and think a bit differently :smile:

Once they fix the cracking problem, that won't be that hard. Checking now, I think I'm on the splash screen for less than two seconds--which is almost as fast as Music + Video, I suspect. I'm lucky in this regard--load time doesn't seem like an issue.

First, Microsoft has to have their team fix their problem. We're already plenty caught up--time for them to catch up now. :angel:

EDIT: Some further testing suggests the cracking is found in other apps (though I can't say always). Which means 8.1 might be the culprit--which is honestly even more worrisome.