Yes, the X-Box Music app is really that bad. And still that bad. I upgraded from 8.1 to 8.0 partly due to that (and a few other unwelcome changes, like removing hubs, social integration, replacing the cursor with a horrid barely working one, removing Bing Vision and Local Scout from search. I made a post about it -
Windows Phone 8.1 Brings Unwelcome Changes | Windows Live space).
-Now Playing was made a pivot instead of its own screen, inexplicably.
-Swiping left/right to change tracks was removed, again inexplicably. They added up/down, but that's not the same and it doesn't match what people are used to. Someone seems hell-bent on keeping Now Playing a pivot. It makes no sense.
-It can't play audiobooks. Zune could. It was a hack with 3rd party software, but it could. XBM can't. Just put things with the genre 'audiobook' into an audiobook pivot! Then use sub-genre for the audiobook genre! "Drama," "Political," "Sci-Fi," etc. How hard is that?
-It can't play podcasts. For some odd reason, this was separated into another app that doesn't get updated all that much. No reason to have done this.
-It can't play video files. For some odd reason, again, this was separated out into another app when NO ONE was asking for this to be done. Just put them back together, Microsoft.
-No Live Tile. One Zune HD you got a beautiful flowing text screensaver with artist imagery. On Zune on desktop you got an album art swivel background, flowing text, and slowly changing colors. You also got a screensaver if you stopped your mouse of the artist images flowing across the screen with text and changing colors. The live tile for the Zune hub did the same. Then, nothing in the 8.0 hub or 8.1 music app. It's just an ugly green tile.
-No keeping the last played artist as the background. Zune Hub did this, and it's better looking than the stark, gray, dull, soviet-style background XBM uses.
-No equalizer within the app. It was added in 8.1, yes, but you have to leave the app and go to settings where it's buried to find it. Just link to it from within XBM.
-No gapless playback. This shouldn't be difficult to add, really.
-No channels. These were professionally curated playlists you could subscribe to that would update either every 2 weeks or every month so you could listen to fresh music based on your tastes
-No picks. Zune gave you picks based on your plays and likes
-No heart/broken heart system. This enabled picks and enabled Smart DJ to work based on likes/dislikes.
-No Social. You can't see what your friends are playing, and you can't share music with them.
-No Radio cart. On Zune you could listen to the FM radio and put songs you heard in the cart, so you could purchase them later. Great for when you get tired of your music, you can get new stuff by listening to the radio. Where's this in XBM? Oh, wait, they clove the app in twain and cut out the FM Radio ability. Then inexplicably changed Smart DJ to Radio, when everyone and their grandmother thinks 'radio' means 'am/fm' and not 'auto playlists.' Just change the name back already.
-Smart DJ was changed to Radio. Why? No idea. It's confusing.
-Zune never altered your metadata for you without your permission. X-Box Music does.
-Zune never refused to play a song because it couldn't find a cloud match. I have hundreds of remixes that aren't in the XBM catalog, and aren't available for cloud streaming, and due to only 16GB without microSD card support, I can't put all of them on my phone to compensate for that lack. And even then, when I play the remixes, such as "Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland (Extended Remix)" the software then believes it's playing the album version, and reports it playing the album version with the album version length, even though the remix is nearly twice as long as the original.
-Zune HD had parallax shifting. Tilt the device and the text/images on the homescreen would float left/right. Great touch.
-No listing the artist's music videos with the artist bio. Zune didn't do this, but 8.0 had it under buzz (odd choice).
-Doesn't utilize buzz for social media.
-Loss of the Zune HD interface. Really take a look at a Zune HD and it had little touches that made it better than X-Box Music. Play next to Music (play all in shuffle). Little micro-album art to tell how much music was in an artist or genre. Pictures under an artist for the lockscreen. Under a song, it had "artist "album title"" while XBM has just artist. No microtext under an album to indicate songs within an album. No + icon to add to a playlist. I could keep going here.
But you get the point. XBM lacks features that Zune HD pioneered, and then they seemed to throw everything out when NO ONE asked them to, and split one app into 4 or 5.
Do you see Apple going around saying, "Let's split iTunes into iTunes Music, iTunes Video, Podcasts, Radio, and iPhone Synch! Everyone will love that! And let's make sure we release it in an early alpha stage and claim it was final software! And our fanboys will still say it's magical, revolutionary, the best thing ever, and part of some grand plan!!" They don't because doing that would be stupid. And what Microsoft did was stupid. Put the apps back into 1, and drop XBM. The name "X-Box Music" to me, is synonymous with buggy, laggy, feature-poor, data-altering-without-permission software. It invokes intense ire, hatred, disgust, and sadness at what was lost. I hate it. I viscerally hate the software. Zune, I miss. Only when they fix every single thing on the list above will I then use X-Box Music again. And even then, I will demand they change the name back to Zune. Zune got it right. X-Box Music is an exercise in frustration and stumbling, bumbling incompetence.