zBox

The mediocrity of Xbox Music as a player on Windows Phone has opened a void in the Microsoft ecosystem that many developers are trying to fill . Several of the alternatives that have been created are notable, and for this reason we have reviewed them here in Xataka Windows (Musik Player, Modern Music, OneMusic, among others).

Even so, I feel that none of them have managed to match the look and feel that we enjoyed in the old Zune app on Windows Phone 7, or the Zune HD, whose interface seemed almost like a work of art to me , and had a fluidity impossible to beat. That said, I think zBox, the app we're reviewing today, is the music player that comes closest to achieving that goal so far.Let's see what it offers us.

The first impression it gives us can be negative, since when using it for the first time it will take time to catalog the entire music collection, and download images of all the artists and albums that we have, which can take us almost an hour in case our collection is large and we have a not so fast connection. However, this effort will be rewarded, thanks to these images zBox gives us a design more attractive and similar to the Zune when exploring the collection.

zBox is missing some details to be the perfect music player, but it comes very close

And its interface, along with being attractive, is practical. On its home screen it shows us at a glance the song that is being played, and by scrolling horizontally it shows the albums/artists/songs most played and recently added

It also offers us instant search, something that doesn't exist in almost any other player. This means that when you search for artists, songs or albums results are displayed as you type.

When exploring the collection, we can immediately know how many songs and albums there are by each artist, since it shows a counter of both under the name of each artist. When accessing the artist or album page, we enjoy a pleasant animated background that increases the sensation of fluidity, and when we press _play_ on a song, playback occurs automatically immediately, without the unpleasant lags that Xbox Music has accustomed us to. Another nice detail is that after a few seconds of playback an animation appears with images of the artist similar to the one we enjoyed on the Zune HD (another example).

Please tell us why

The app's live tile shows the current album at all times, and we also enjoy deep integration with Last.fm , thanks to which we can access the biography of each performer and find out if the artist is on tour, directly from the playback screen. We are also allowed to to scrobble Last.fm without the need for any add-on.

There is support for selecting multiple songs, deleting songs, reordering the play queue, and pinning albums or artists to the home screen. We can also create and edit playlists, although again we find that the player does not read the playlists synchronized from iTunes with the Windows Phone desktop application, nor neither are those of Xbox Music. This problem is repeated in all the music players we have tested, so I think it is due to a limitation of the Windows Phone system and APIs.

We also miss the support for Cortana and for the Spanish language, but the developer claims that it is already working on that, and it even offers us a page on UserVoice to suggest other improvements.

But beyond these limitations, which we hope will be resolved soon, the feeling that zBox transmits is incredibly good, better than any other player I've tried, or of course much better than the experience by Xbox Music. I think anyone who makes heavy use of their Windows Phone to play music should stop trying this app

zboxVersion 2014.11.24.1

• Developer: Istvan Farmosi
• Download it at: Windows Phone Store
• Price: Free
• Category: music + video
• English language