Reasons Xbox music sucks!

[Jazmac]

with the addition of the onedrive storage, I'm finding it takes a very long time for the first song to play when you hit the shuffle play button. the first song takes minutes to load, if it loads at all.

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What kind of phone and is that on data, wifi or both?

 

[Crakeur]

What kind of phone and is that on data, wifi or both?

lumia 822. wifi is ok, not great. data, however, is brutal.

 

[Jose_Rey]

My issue with Xbox music isn't really a service issue. I love the service. Grandfathered with +10. My issue is more so the apps, both on the PC and phone.

The WP app worked fine streaming my music but when I synced my local library via WP app for desktop, I'd get duplicates. I waited since 2012 til January 2015 for Microsoft to fix this, then I gave up and moved to android.

On the PC side the app just freezes(2 different PCs), and at the moment I can't download music pass content. Not that I ever do anyways. It's easier for me to keep track of what I own if I only download what I own, at least using the XBM app. But I'll give it props for being smart enough with my OneDrive music folder. Definitely better than managing it with zune by miles.

 

[Jazmac]

lumia 822. wifi is ok, not great. data, however, is brutal.

Interesting. Reason I'm asking is the speed at which you say the music starts. Wifi is just ok and data is worse. I don't know if you can do LTE or not but sticking with wifi, my speed to start playing is pretty much instantaneous. Weird kind of experience you're having to say the least.

 

[Crakeur]

Interesting. Reason I'm asking is the speed at which you say the music starts. Wifi is just ok and data is worse. I don't know if you can do LTE or not but sticking with wifi, my speed to start playing is pretty much instantaneous. Weird kind of experience you're having to say the least.

The issue is worse when using the LTE. That's the big shocker.
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[Jazmac]

The issue is worse when using the LTE. That's the big shocker.
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I didn't ask about LTE because I know some places are not enabled. That is a surprise. When I first signed up, it took a little time for Xbox to get my music in order but after the dust settled, it runs well. It shouldn't be stalling on you like you say. What did your mobile speed test tell you? (assuming you have one of those apps installed)

 

[Crakeur]

I didn't ask about LTE because I know some places are not enabled. That is a surprise. When I first signed up, it took a little time for Xbox to get my music in order but after the dust settled, it runs well. It shouldn't be stalling on you like you say. What did your mobile speed test tell you? (assuming you have one of those apps installed)

I don't have a mobile speed app installed because I've never had any issues with the speed. everything has always been fast enough. The sad thing is, I'd just switch to playing only the songs on my phone, and stop streaming but half my downloaded songs, all owned by me, shut the player down which is my original issue posted in this thread.

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[Christopher Lindsay]

Another thing that sucks about it is on Win7 using music.xbox.com you can't delete multiple albums from your collection!



And another thing that pisses me off (again on W7 web client) is when browsing either your collection, playlists, or the music pass catalog, it takes several seconds to load, which essentially takes forever to view results, especially long lists. And if you accidentally click an item (or on purpose), when you go back it starts loading results from the beginning. Ugh!

Didn't even know there was a web app lol.

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

I think people need to educate themselves first. MSFT made mention of the transition from Zune to Xbox for Music and Video shortly after Windows 8 was released. The concept was to integrate a music playing experience across multiple platforms which I'd say they accomplished. Now I think we all remember the growing pains in the beginning but MSFT has done a good job in steadily pushing out updates and the program is running as smooth as ever.

You can download playlists. I've downloaded two of them. If you look at the album art, in a lot of cases they'll have an explicit and then an album art picture without the explicit tag. I like the other features like related artists and history. This isn't a standalone media player. It was never meant to be. For what Xbox music is designed for it does a great job. If you're heavily immersed in the music pass which I have been for almost six years now then it works for you, however I also use MixRadio, and Mixtapes. Xbox music doesn't do some of what the other players do, but it doesn't suck.

Why are you quoting me? I never mentioned anything about downloading playlist.

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

I also have a problem with Xbox music, everytime i copy a podcast onto my phone, it doesnt show up on the list.
I have to enter my files app and then look for the podcast to open it, which is terrible because its basically a greyed out interface with no album art or any functions at all, and if you hit back it stops playing. Annoying @#?*
I tried to restart my phone and even force it to scan sd card and it still doesn't do a single thing.

This is exactly what I've been forced to do.

 

[Shobin Drogan]

This is exactly what I've been forced to do.

I have recently found a fix for this, and that is to use VLC player, it seems to be working. Thank god.

 

[Yazen]

I have recently found a fix for this, and that is to use VLC player, it seems to be working. Thank god.

Foobar is coming to WP! Hopefully they take advantage of Xbox Music APIs

 

[C LaBelle]

It's telling me I need an Xbox music pass to play a song I already own and is physically on my device. I'm not paying to play music I already paid for! Stupid!

 

[tangledW]

I have recently found a fix for this, and that is to use VLC player, it seems to be working. Thank god.

Meh, I have a large collection and I don't think it's ever fully loaded it. Plus, everytime there is an update, it must re-index my entire collection.

 

[tangledW]

I think I've already posted this here, but I'll do it again anyway.

Today's release of Music Preview on Windows 10 basically tells me that nothing will change, although it is an early build.

What I want most is to have the app recognize ALL METADATA, and be able to use that criteria for searches and playlist creation - like auto playlists in Windows Media Player.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make playlists with a large collection the way Xbox Music works now (and how the Music Preview appears)?

 

[Motor_Mouth]

Here are some of the best music apps you should try: (In no particular order)
1. Perfect Music
2. ModernMusic
3. Zbox
4. Audiotica

I've tried all but the last one and each fail on various fronts. e.g. Perfect Music doesn't show any artwork for anything at all. It seems to be a text-only UI to me and when I emailed them about it they ignored me. ModernMusic's UI is hideous and zbox tires hard to be like Zune but fails.
OTOH, I've just installed Audiotica and it looks like it might be the best yet. It's found artist pics for 99% of my music, even really obscure stuff, and it seems to work quite well. It feels a lot like Groove, only more streamlined.

Curated playlists for every genre. I listen to music half my day, ain't nobody got time for searching for music on a mobile app

How many genres do you think there are? What genre would you consider a band like The Cure to belong to? Genres are hopeless in digital music. I have albums by a solo EBM artist that have "Metal", "Pop", "Rock" and "Electronica" attached to albums of very similar music.

I wish it allowed us to attach artist images without subscribing to the xbox music pass. Thats what sucks for me BIG time...

I've never had a Pass and mine has background images for most of my artists. That might be because I used MPA Tool to get my album artwork but they are definitely there.

It honestly seems like the people managing xbox music don't LOVE music.

Exactly! And that is the complete opposite to how Zune feels. It's infuriating at times.

... but MSFT has done a good job in steadily pushing out updates and the program is running as smooth as ever.

Maybe for you but they have not fixed so much as a single issue for me. XBM is as useless for me today as it was the day I first opened it in 2012.

If you look at the album art, in a lot of cases they'll have an explicit and then an album art picture without the explicit tag.[/QUOTE}
Less than half my collection shows any album art at all. It's worse than hopeless.

I like the other features like related artists and history.

Both were present in Zune and worked better.

This isn't a standalone media player. It was never meant to be. For what Xbox music is designed for it does a great job.

No, it doesn't. It is measurably worse than Zune in EVERY SINGLE WAY and so bad at the very basics that you have to wonder if they aren't doing it on purpose sometimes.

Xbox music doesn't do some of what the other players do, but it doesn't suck.

OK, there are apps that suck even worse but make no mistake, X-Box Music most definitely does SUCK!

I have so many songs that I own that don't work in my Xbox music app it's ridiculous. Maybe because I didn't load them one at a time. Almost half my library is unavailable to me. I always end up using the file app to play my music.

I've never had any such problems. XBM may have taken forever to find everything but there is nothing in my collection, most of which is ripped from CD, that doesn't play.

Meh, I have a large collection and I don't think it's ever fully loaded it. Plus, everytime there is an update, it must re-index my entire collection.

Mine did that a couple of times but it hasn't had to do it for at least 18 months.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make playlists with a large collection the way Xbox Music works now (and how the Music Preview appears)?

I always make playlists by hand. I couldn't imagine doing it any other way.

 

[Motor_Mouth]

OK, now it is my turn. Let's frame this conversation first, though. The biggest problem with X Box Music is Zune. For me, Zune was an application that completely transformed my opinion of Microsoft, singlehandedly. It offerred far and away the best experience of any music ecosystem on any platform and was the nearest thing to going into your local record shop. It felt like it had been lovingly crafted by people whose love of music matched my own. Until I discovered Zune, I didn't think I would ever give up my CD collection but it persuaded me to spend hundreds of hours ripping my 1000+ collection of discs because it felt so similar in so many ways. I could sit and read artist bios while I listened to music and watch super-cool collages of album covers that reminded me of my teenage bedroom walls, festooned with my favourite things.

And now we have this... this "thing" that seems to have been designed by the finance dept to maximise income. It would be OK if it was just a bit soulless but the bloody thing doesn't even work! Here is my list of issues on the W8.1 app:

1. It took my lovingly curated collection from Zune and arbitrarily decided to reassign some songs to other artists who had released a song with the same name. That wouldn't be a problem, except there is no way to fix it. (It is still correct in Zune.)

2. Less than half the "albums" (they should call them "releases" instead because there are a lot of singles and EPs in there, too) show up with any artwork, even though I have gone to great lengths to ensure everything looks perfect in Zune. There is no way to fix this manually.

3. A large number of "artist" images are just horrible tiled pictures from album artwork and they look awful.

4. On the rare occasions I can't find something elsewhere and have to buy it from MSFT, I always have trouble with the downloads. e.g. A couple of days ago I bought an album with 17 tracks. The first 12 tracks downloaded in a few minutes, the last five took three more hours. I've tried both my phone (4G) and laptop (wi-fi at home and at work) and had exactly the same issues every time. OTOH, albums I buy from other sources download normally. This wouldn't be such a huge issue if XBM showed you what was going on, a download bar or something similar, but it doesn't. Most of the time it looks like it's stalled. It is just rubbish service.

4. Navigating to the album you want is terrible. You only get three different ways to sort your music. In Zune, the three column layout mean\t there were literally dozens of different ways to get to things quickly and easily.

5. No screen-savers, no artist bios, no band photo backgrounds, no similar artists, visualisations, no nothing. It is sterile and horrible.

6. No facility for ripping CDs or syncing music with other devices. That means I now need to have three different apps to do what Zune, and even Windows Media Player, can do all by themselves.

The bottom line here is that the XBM app is worse than WMP. If that doesn't have alarm bells ringing in Redmond then I don't know what will get through to them.

I have fewer problems with XBM on my phone. It is much closer to Zune, with the following exceptions:

1. It doesn't recognise the album artwork for more than half my collection. Somebody had to write an app, MPA Tool, to fix this problem. Why haven't MSFT fixed it?

2. They took out the New Music (or Recent or whatever it was called) that allowed me to quickly get to the things I had most recently added to the device (you know, the stuff I am most likely to want to listen to).

Apart from those two gripes, they have managed to keep XBM on WinPhone much more like Zune was. That, of course, only helps to remind us just how bad it is on Windows 8, which is why I still use Zune for everything I can and only use XBM when I have no other choice. Unfortunately, XBM still has the biggest range of music I have come across, so now and then I still have to buy from them, but I'm never happy about it since they closed down the Zune Marketplace (where I used to spend $100 a month or so).

 

[Mohamed Ahmed Nader]

I don't know if someone mentioned this but not having famous file extension support such as flac made me flip out since at the beginning u had to buy an app then I found perfectmusic app which is really awesome with some android like style of customization and look.

I prefer u guys give it a try

 

[Machiventa858]

5. No screen-savers, no artist bios, no band photo backgrounds, no similar artists, visualisations, no nothing. It is sterile and horrible.

I can't speak for Win8/8.1 but at least on the Win7 web client there's artist bios with a band photo, and similar artists. Although the bios are at the very bottom, I wish they were at the top next to the band photo.

I thought on Win8/8.1 if you go to now playing it has a half-assed screensaver/visualization?

 

[Drop The Remote]

they need to put bluetooth in the xbox