Xbox Music Explained.

stevenmsoto

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Hi guys, maybe someone with a little more knowledge knows how Xbox Music works. With its cloud capabilities, it's kinda confusing. If someone can give me a detailed explanation of all the features of Xbox Music it would be greatly appreciated! Cheers!
 

tofu.

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yes this was all poorly done by MS. It seems like an amazing feature, yet their documentation is vague at best.

I can't even figure out how to get my cloud music onto my phone. I have a radio signal next to them on my win8 pc, but there's nothing showing up on my phone. both are on the same LIVE account and both have the cloud feature enabled
 

conanheath

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It's a cluster to say the least. Great concept, but poor execution by MS. Here is what I have figured out so far and is by no means completely accurate as it is just trial and error. And I don't have it on my laptop or on Xbox, only RT and 920. You have to have an account. Monthly or yearly pricing. You can have up to four devices attached to account and they are easy to add and remove, but there are time limits. You can't change it daily, I think. With account you can stream, download, "smart DJ" to your hearts content. There is a podcast section, but I haven't made it that far. In music store, if you select an album it will come up with price first, then price will be replaced with download button. Click to down load to that device. It will update your library on other devices, supposedly, but will not auto download, only stream. This feature seems very hit and miss for me. It's impossible to tell what is your music and what is downloaded from MS on phone or tablet. On RT, you have the option to buy song, but on phone I haven't found easy way to buy. Keeping your music separate from Xbox music is nightmare. For $100 a year I don't plan on ever stopping service but if you did it would be a beating to delete all Xbox music. From what I can tell, it checks for licensing each time you play song. I had a lot if issues in a non lte area playing my music and couldn't play downloaded content. I have no idea where the problem lies. As for PC, I have no idea what can and can't be done. All of MS integration is great, but a few how to videos would have been nice. There's more and I will keep posting as I have time.
 

tofu.

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You have to have an account. Monthly or yearly pricing.


Well, that explains it. I was under the impression that cloud matching was free and that the monthly subscription was for their "unlimited music" feature which gives you access to their entire database.
 

stevenmsoto

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I think its an awesome feature but just lacks the simplicity of actually using it, hopefully it will improve overtime. Thanks for the replies! Team Windows!
 

tofu.

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This thread might highlight some of the confusion/unexpected behavior people are seeing with Xbox Music.

http://forums.windowscentral.com/wi...ollection-wp8-xbox-windows-8-coming-soon.html

hmm..

so the song matching IS free, but not currently functioning.


It did start working for me when i tried the 30 day music pass, but someone said that is because it's just pulling songs with the same title off of the xbox music collection, and not actual cloud matching. Ok.. makes sense.
 

dawindbag

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hmm..

so the song matching IS free, but not currently functioning.


It did start working for me when i tried the 30 day music pass, but someone said that is because it's just pulling songs with the same title off of the xbox music collection, and not actual cloud matching. Ok.. makes sense.

It's unclear if it's fully broken or if it's just limited to Win8 devices and not working on WP8 and Xbox. I don't have a second Win8 PC to test against. The "matching" itself works, with some really annoying quirks but it works. It's just accessing those songs isn't apparently live yet, nor is it clear if it will be a free or fee based service.
 

erasure25

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Some MS braniac thought it would be such a great idea to make it so that when Xbox Music does not find an exact match for your track, the app should create a new entry that is a stream only entry of the song it thinks you have, which may or may not be a duplicate of a song that physically resides on your hard drive. This way, your library can be filled with stream only duplicates and/or completely incorrect songs!! Please fire this person.
 

Soxpranos

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If anyone knows how to remove songs from cloud storage it would be greatly appreciated. I found that any music in ur phone that had the stream signal, u can hut download again and it gets put on ur phone as non stream. The thing is how do I permanently remove the streams I downloaded , cause they seem to lag when playing in automobile.
 

tofu.

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why on earth doesnt this thing match FLAC files?

i mean i'm not asking it to upload anything... just match them.

c'mon MS...


edit: could i convert my 35k song flac collection into 64bit mp3s and let it match, then delete the mp3s?
 

gsquared

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If anyone knows how to remove songs from cloud storage it would be greatly appreciated. I found that any music in ur phone that had the stream signal, u can hut download again and it gets put on ur phone as non stream. The thing is how do I permanently remove the streams I downloaded , cause they seem to lag when playing in automobile.

This is how I did it:

11-25-2012, 09:45 AM #5

Big Update.

Was able to get my existing cloud collection deleted. This was creating a problem on my phone. I was lucky that I have a tablet without any music on it. I fired up Xbox Music and all of the garbage from the existing cloud collection showed up. I was able to delete these entries. Now the only music showing on my phone with the "Xbox Music cloud collection" turned on is the albums I have download to the device via PC Sync."​



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kittengirl

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Heavy sigh - I have also pretty much given up on music on my shiney new Nokia Lumia 810, until MS fixes it. I try to be optimistic, figuring that if I try hard enough, I will get things fixed. But so far, no luck. Many of my albums are not showing up with just duplicate songs on the phone, but in some cases, UP TO FIVE COPIES of the same song. And then others don't show up at all. In xBox music on the phone, a lot of albums just are not showing up, so I started using the Nokia app instead - found the missing ones do (mostly) show up there. But both apps have the multiple song problem. And it gets stranger. Right now, I've got the phone plugged into my laptop and was just viewing the music saved the phone's Micro SD card, and these songs don't show up multiple times there - just on the phone (and before you ask, I have cloud sync tunred off, and the icon next to the multiple copies shows them as being saved locally, so that's not the proglem). And to make matters even worse, there are some albums showing up when I explore the card on my computer that don't show up at all on the phone.

When I discovered exactly how bad it was, I was at the gym and was sort of tempted to throw my phone across the room. Maybe that would have gotten MS's attention - it's the gym next to their main campus and over half the members are MS employees (I have run into Steve B. himself there doing early morning workouts - guess I'd get thrown out of the club if I went up to him and just started ranting about this issue though...) For now, it's back to my iPod for me..
 

bhinesley

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If you can explain Xbox music, I'd like to hear it. As a Zune Pass subscriber since 2001, I think it's a complete mess. The Zune software should simply have been rebranded as Xbox Music. I have had a WP7 for 2 years, and think that the Zune pass was the killer feature that was never properly promoted. Much, much better than iTunes. I just upgraded to Windows 8 this weekend, I've had a WP8 since launch day. The WP8 is great, but I've been struggling for weeks about the syncing situation (there is none, apparently). Tonight, I've been messing about with the Windows 8 Xbox music app. It is amazingly frustrating to use. Go ahead, try to find an album from your favorite artist. Excuse me if I don't wait for you to report back. When I finally did manage it, there didn't seem to be any way to use the 10 credits I get a month for a purchase. So just a few minutes ago I downloaded the Zune software and am hoping that I can at least use it to find and download my music again. I cannot imagine why Microsoft changed this. I can only hope that whoever is responsible for this debacle is or has been fired. This needs to be fixed ASAP. If anyone can explain how to use it, I would really like to hear it. It would make a great "How to" article also!
 

gsquared

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I believe there is a known duplication issue with the SD cards. Not sure if its considered an OS or phone issue. I think if you move your music off the SD card it will go away.
 

kittengirl

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Well, the whole reason I have the SD card is for the music, so that's not an acceptable fix for the problem. In fact, it's one of the main reasons I went with a model that has the option of using an SD card. If I move my music off the SD card, I'll pretty much have no music, since I have far more music than can fit on the remainder of my phone memory.
 

kevin2577

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Restricted to devices that support the new DRM, which is based on the old Zune drm which was based on PlaysForSure but not cross compatible.

For now only works with Windows Phone 8 devices, Windows 8/RT devices, and Xbox. Android and iOS clients announced so it should work on those devices in those apps once they are announced
 

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