Reasons Xbox music sucks!

[Motor_Mouth]

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

There is no "Now Playing", there is just a single UI for everything. It's awful.

 

[Machiventa858]

There is no "Now Playing", there is just a single UI for everything. It's awful.

At least on Windows 8.1 there is. Not sure why you're not seeing it. I just used my wife's 8.1 laptop with the newest Music app and it's right there under Collection, Radio, and Explore. When selected it gives an option to go full screen which shows moving band photos. It's not quite as cool as the Zune software's now playing but it's still pretty cool.

 

[Jazmac]

It is so funny to read people saying just how much they loved Zune cause when it was out, it seemed everybody hated it, including and especially its name. They cussed Balmer like nobodies business. lol

 

[jlzimmerman]

Android 1.6 had seeking

Pretty much every entry level device that can play music supports gapless playback. Xbox Music? Nope

Yeah, this is mind-boggling. WTF. How many years has other phones/MP3 players had this feature. It cannot be that many lines of code. FFS this absolutely kills the feeling of listing to a live album.

 

[Yazen]

Yeah, this is mind-boggling. WTF. How many years has other phones/MP3 players had this feature. It cannot be that many lines of code. FFS this absolutely kills the feeling of listing to a live album.

Their Radio algorithms heavily favor lower $/listen songs as well!
Thought MixRadio was bad in this respect, however Xbox Music takes the cake.

Anyone else notice that the app has to sign in each and every time? When I get back in my car with MixRadio paused there is no issue continuing where I left off.

I loaded Xbox Music on my siblings device and he does not touch it .. Don't blame him either, uses the free iTunes service on his iPhone ...

 

[Yazen]

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

And with this in mind, Microsoft decided to adopt playlist standards instead of trying to pin users into their ecosystem.

 

[Motor_Mouth]

At least on Windows 8.1 there is. Not sure why you're not seeing it. I just used my wife's 8.1 laptop with the newest Music app and it's right there under Collection, Radio, and Explore. When selected it gives an option to go full screen which shows moving band photos. It's not quite as cool as the Zune software's now playing but it's still pretty cool.

Oh yeah, it's there today and here is what it looks like:



Fabulous, isn't it? To be fair, it works better for some bands but given that only around 20% of my collection has artwork, I'm not confident it will ever be useful. And it doesn't really compare to this from Zune, does it?



Here's an example of how completely useless and ugly it is overall:

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

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!

Exact problem I have.

 

[Christopher Kendalls]

I found out the hard way that the $5 gift card I acquired through Bing Rewards only works on Windows 8 on a PC, not the phone.

Personally I like for Xbox Music to scan me entire phone and synchronize music with OneDrive. I have to manually upload my music to OneDrive, which is very tedious.

Playlists appear to be the only way to ensure that songs from Xbox Music Pass are available both on the phone and online. But it can take anywhere from 48 hours to never for playlists to synchronize.

 

[sinime]

I found out the hard way that the $5 gift card I acquired through Bing Rewards only works on Windows 8 on a PC, not the phone.

If you go to your wallet on the phone, does the gift card show up? I use the rewards gift cards on my phone all the time... Whether I add them to my account through the Xbox or through my wallet app, they all combine and can be seen in the wallet app.

 

[Christopher Kendalls]

If you go to your wallet on the phone, does the gift card show up? I use the rewards gift cards on my phone all the time... Whether I add them to my account through the Xbox or through my wallet app, they all combine and can be seen in the wallet app.

It does. I worked with @xboxsupport on Twitter about the issue. I ended up purchasing an episode of Two Broke Girls on Xbox Video.

What I don't understand about the Xbox apps is that Xbox Video is far easier. Yet Xbox Music is so abstract. I prefer Spotify for file synchronization. Even MixRadio is preferable. Music players on Linux are easier to use. Its easier to use an app like Music Locker to access music from OneDrive than it is to use the Xbox Music app.

I think some of the frustration with Xbox Music is that there are users coming from Android where every OEM installs their own player, and that isn't the case on WP. On Android Google Music Player is an option, but there are often other alternatives out of the box.

Another issue I have, petty as it may be, is that I had gotten used to Google Music Player caching tracks I streamed automatically. If I listened to the same 5 tracks, they were only downloaded once. If I cleared the cache, they were downloaded again. With Xbox Music, you can sync your online collection, but it is not clear that doing so is the same as caching music you've streamed. I don't know, GMP just seems to be more intuitive to me.

Once you learn Xbox Music and it's idiosyncrasies, you love it. But that should not be the case.

 

[reversalagent]

I know this might not be the best place to reply, but maybe someone, just anyone on the Xbox Music team, will see this and think about their app.
I took advantage of the Pi Day special, MS offered for Xbox Music, having always wanted to try it and hearing about the good music selection available. I will say of most of the online music apps I have tried, Xbox Music appears to have the biggest selection.

Having used a WP device (playing with WP 10) but primarily using an iPhone, I can list several issues. These are not particularly iPhone specific.

• The app has not been updated for iPhone 6/6+. The phone has been out for nearly 8 months. Please update so the app takes proper advantage of the new screen resolutions.
• No lyric support. The latest update to Amazon Prime Music now has lyrics on many of the big/popular songs. It scrolls along as the song progresses. It is a nice addition to the experience.
• Genres. I know this somewhat goes against the ethos of Xbox Music, but it would be really nice to just have genres. "Classic Country", "Pop", etc.
• The webpage shows a section of New Music, yet on the app, within the radio section, all I see is Recommended and a bunch of artist, a bunch of which do not generally even fit my musical preference.
• Speaking of the web player, please move away from a flash based player. MS has promoted and moved towards HTML5, so it would be nice to have a web player which does not rely on Flash.

Just my 0.02.

 

[kevin_tenza]

Yeah. it sucks so much it pisses me off

 

[jockopablo]

[*]Genres. I know this somewhat goes against the ethos of Xbox Music, but it would be really nice to just have genres. "Classic Country", "Pop", etc.

I used Slacker for years and loved it, but after switching to Windows Phone and then buying an Xbox One I decided to try Xbox Music. Aside from the ability to ban songs and/or artists, genres are the main thing I miss. I especially miss the decades stations because for genres I've figured out some great artists to create stations around that give me what I want (e.g. James Brown for soul/funk, Willie Nelson for classic country, KISS for hard rock/hair metal). It's much tougher building a good decades station when you have to base it on a single artist. I'm still trying to find a good artist to build a '70s station around.

Overall I'm very satisfied with Xbox Music, though. I love being able to use my Xbox One to listen to music on my HT system, and streaming works very well on my Lumia 830. The only issue I've had with the WP app is that for some reason it likes to auto-select shuffle mode when I go to stream an album. I prefer to listen to the album straight through in proper order.

 

[Scotty_doesknow]

Its not Zune

 

[pointycatears]

Thinks I hate about Xbox music:

For some reason, sometimes when I unlock my phone, even if it's gone past the time that I need to enter my phone's password, it will accidentally skip the song I'm listening to when the lock screen lifts. And I can't go back to it, so I have to do it manually from the list of songs. GRRRAARRGGHHH!!!

You can only make a playlist of 1000 songs, which is not good for those who have 2000+ songs like me.

Also, if you listen to just "Songs" without a playlist, if you have more than 1000 songs, then it doesn't add them all to the playlist that generates them, so when you can't find a song you want to listen to, you have to go back to the songs list and pick it, which generates a new playlist that leaves out other songs.

Even with wifi, it doesn't download album art. Also, for some songs that have individual track art rather than the whole album, it will show one random track art image and apply it to all songs in that album.

 

[Jose Mayorking]

My problem is that it always skips back to the first song (on Nokia Lumia). It doesn't matter if I have it on shuffle or not, after 10 songs or so it will skip back to the first mp3 I have on my phone (alphabetically). The worse part is that I used to like that song a lot. Now I want to thow my phone across the room every time I hear it.

Also, does anybody know how to disable the prompt "listening to loud music can result in permanent damage....." that's totally hippopotamus..

 

[supadryz]

Ok so this has had numerous updates & yet I still can not download & save tracks so they are able to be played offline on my phone. You have this feather on Windows 10 PC but not on phone. This sucks big time.

 

[Andreas Pitters]

We should not have to download "every single music app" out there just because the built in feature of this disappointing machine is an epic failure.

The music feature should be user friendly, user focused and efficient. I can sync an album to iPod classic from iTunes in the time it takes this software to sync a song received by bluetooth. It is absolutely horrendous - I regret not only buying WP but ever using Windows for anything