Is Xbox Music as mind-numbingly awful on newer Windows Phones?

[snowmutt]

Reason why I stayed on WP7 for as long as I did until I just recently broke down and bought this L920: Zune VS. XBOX Music. LOVED my Zune experience. Knew XBOX Music was inferior in everry way.

Reason why I will not load up the developers WP 8.1: The WP 8.0 XBOX Music hub is at least usable. I will wait until the official WP 8.1 comes out, enjoy all the upgrades then, and pray XBOX Music app is better.

This music service has the potential to be the best one out there. But Microsoft has fallen on their sword repeatedly, and it sure seems as though each time that sword gets bigger and bigger and the wholes take more work to fix.

 

[anon(5579515)]

And this is why my iPod Touch still haunts me daily...

 

[DReevell]

xBox Music is shockingly bad for me...was kind of working 'til the weekend (albeit slowly and clunky). Don't know what's happened over the weekend, but it no longer starts. Just click on the icon and the screen goes black and nothing EVER happens apart from a timeout.

 

[bijak_riyandi]

never used Xbox Music, even when I used 8.0
just opened it to check out "what's this" when I got the phone and "what's new" when I updated to 8.1 DP

yeah, it's damn awful...
but thankfully, Nokia MixRadio can play songs in your phone, too
so, MixRadio FTW!

 

[spyderzWPC]

I find it has gotten a lot better with the patches. It was pretty much unusable when 8.1 was first released. I had used the beta on wp8 with no problem but 8.1 broke it. the updates have been making it smoother and smoother. Mind you I have 128 gig card in it, and about 70 gigs of music. I don't seem to have any issues (after the update). whats not working and have you tried doing a reset on the device?

 

[herbertsnow]

Plus clowns are creepy

 

[loofmodnar]

I've tried it on my 520 with a 64GB SD and 920. It's noticeably better on the 920 but I also have about 1/10 the music on it.

Music has been improving for sure but they need to focus on the speed of the entire app more than features. It's ludicrously slow. Swiping to change songs is something I missed but it does little to make the app usable.

 

[TechFreak1]

In all honesty sometimes i just wish they bought the zune experience, rebranded it xbox music and sync client back without all this faffing about. The sync client has been in preview release since the launch of WP8. The xbox music app is now somewhat useable but nowhere where it should be this late into the WP8's life cycle.

Sometimes I wonder if the blind are leading the blind... as they make terrific products, apps and experiences only to destroy them in the future for reasons unknown to us consumers. So we are left to speculate why ad nauseam, perhaps if we had a clear insight of their roadmap it would give us more clarity and perhaps hope to some (I'm in with WP for the long haul as I have what I need right now in terms of functionality and apps).

Fortunately for us Lumia owners we have Nokia Mix Radio as a fall back however others do not have that option.

 

[AlexOwliver]

For anyone who keeps excusing this as a dev beta, the 630 is now out in the wild with final 8.1 software (new build) and it still takes me half my walk to the subway just to get a song to turn on. Forget trying to access the music app from Cortana music search, wifi or otherwise. Blank screens and glitchy scrolling everywhere. No recent plays. Cyan 920 and super fed up with it.

 

[garak0410]

Bi-weekly updates are not enough. We need weekly updates. Or even ASAP. It's that bad.

I agree here...this just isn't the 8.1 preview. XBOX Music has been in perpetual beta (dare I say Alpha) since day one.

 

[twentythreee]

Many folks out there who say it's not released yet. But yes, as some others said, the 630 is already out and the 930 will be within the next month.

Just think about this: You don't know about these issues and buy a new phone, the 630/930, and get this experience.
To be honest, this is ****. I would return a phone with such a crappy music experience. I would not even search for a music app in the store, because that's something everyone assumes to come with the phone built-in.

I really hate to say it, but MS does an aweful job in making apps, especially the new XBOX (Xbox itself, Music, Video) apps.

 

[Angry_Mushroom]

It's pretty bad on my 810. Finally fixed the duplicated song issue. Instead all the tracks have been moved down by one. So title 2 is for song 1, and title three for two... How in the hell did that happen?! I hope they fix it, or I'm gonna have to bust my Zen out.

 

[loofmodnar]

In all honesty sometimes i just wish they bought the zune experience, rebranded it xbox music and sync client back without all this faffing about. The sync client has been in preview release since the launch of WP8. The xbox music app is now somewhat useable but nowhere where it should be this late into the WP8's life cycle.

It drive me crazy. The Zune team spent years refining the experience based on user feedback. The Zune software and HD hardware was awesome. I get MS had a lot of internal political issues but it seems like they literally threw away everything that the team learned and worked on all because the Zune brand was considered a failure. Even though the final result was pretty universally praised.

There's no way they can bring back the old software but they could at least go figure out what made it good and try to incorporate that into the current product.

 

[anon(123856)]

Download Nokias software recovery tool back to good all time wp8 version

Yup. That's the way I did it.

 

[fardream]

Worth noting that 8.1 hasn't seen the public release yet. So it still is vaguely excusable as beta.

It sucks universally as it's the same across the 8.1 board. The extra horsepower of higher end phone probably does help somewhat, but it won't cover for the plain badness it is in currently.

If it's any consolation, they're improving it with biweekly updates, so they got that going for them.

They started selling Lumia 63X already....

 

[red grenadine]

I think the update killed the music hub workaround. I tried using the music app again and its still completely unusable. They must have one lone 19 year old summer intern working on this.

I'm done with the platform until this experience is not just fixed but at least on par with the old Zune mobile experience. Hopefully that doesn't take years but I have no reason to be optimistic that the same people who can't put in gapless playback after 4 years will be able to get an integral part of their phone functionality up to snuff within a decent time frame.

Cue the haters, but I've been on this platform since day 1 with a Samsung Focus and have received nothing but frustration in return. All I want to do is have the same music experience my Zune HD gave me years ago. Is that so much to ask?

 

[TrueMetalGeek]

I had an issue on my Nokia Icon last week that took away my ability to play more than 30 second previews of each song on the radio using Xbox Music Pass.
I chatted with tech support and by the next morning I noticed my phone updated the app.
Don't know if that was them or a coincidence but when I signed in the next day the ability to play entire songs was restored.

I don't use the app to play my own music much but more for using the music pass to stream almost any song or album at any time.
Overall with a few little delays to wait for it to sign me in again (talking maybe ten seconds when I open it) it works pretty good for me.
I haven't figured out how to use Cortana with it much but I can search for a band, album etch and it plays it. Streams Bluetooth to my headphones and car Bluetooth and seems to continue where I left it so I am overall pretty happy.

I haven't loaded a large collection in my phone's internal memory or tried to create custom playlists to know how well that works on my Nokia Icon.

 

[red grenadine]

I had an issue on my Nokia Icon last week that took away my ability to play more than 30 second previews of each song on the radio using Xbox Music Pass.
I chatted with tech support and by the next morning I noticed my phone updated the app.
Don't know if that was them or a coincidence but when I signed in the next day the ability to play entire songs was restored.

I don't use the app to play my own music much but more for using the music pass to stream almost any song or album at any time.
Overall with a few little delays to wait for it to sign me in again (talking maybe ten seconds when I open it) it works pretty good for me.
I haven't figured out how to use Cortana with it much but I can search for a band, album etch and it plays it. Streams Bluetooth to my headphones and car Bluetooth and seems to continue where I left it so I am overall pretty happy.

I haven't loaded a large collection in my phone's internal memory or tried to create custom playlists to know how well that works on my Nokia Icon.

I think if you load local music the app just craps out. I just don't think the app can handle large amounts of songs on local storage

 

[sketchy9]

All I want to do is have the same music experience my Zune HD gave me years ago. Is that so much to ask?

Exactly. I feel like this is what the XBM apologists and MS refuse to recognize. We know that Zune is dead. It's gone. Never coming back. Honestly, I don't care. It was a strange name anyway. But what we want is the functionality: the ability to manage music AND podcasts in one app (imagine that); seamless local syncing; the ability to easily find and download marketplace music; playlist management that actually works; fun features like playcounts, song ratings, etc. to get our music the way WE want it.

Sadly it seems that local syncing and management of music will never be "fixed". In fact, at this point, one has to assume that it's deliberately broken to drive people into the music streaming arena. But for me, and I suspect most other people, music streaming is a nice supplement to a local collection; it's not the main way we want to listen to music. So I've stuck with my Zune HD and the day it dies is the day I cancel my XBM pass. In all probability, I'll jump platforms to Android at that point as well. Truthfully I should probably do that now since the music is already broken on WP, but I'll stick around since my 920 is still going strong.

 

[James8561]

the app absolutely suck as shown by the huge amount of complaints and the dropping 2 stars rating on the store.
with today's update, the app became laggier and buggier.
I don't get it. what's so hard about making a music player???