Xbox Music

After renewing itself in Windows 8.1, Xbox Music made the leap to the web two days ago. It is Microsoft's competition against iTunes, Spotify or Pandora, but we are still not entirely clear about what it offers us. That is why we bring you today an in-depth analysis of this service, also including its capabilities on Windows Phone 8.

As an advance, I already tell you that what Microsoft offers is not worth it if you are minimally demanding with your music. Inconsistent applications, incomplete applications and synchronization with Windows Phone that leaves something to be desired.

Xbox Music on desktop

The first time I tried the Music app in Windows 8 I almost cried. In addition to a really awkward interface, it was excruciatingly slow. So when the redesign with Windows 8.1 was rumored, I was pretty happy… until I tried it.

The new version of Xbox Music has three sections: Collection, Radio, and Explore. The first is where all of our music is, with views by Albums, Artists, and Songs. If we want to explore by year of release, we have to go to Albums and order by year; and if we want to see the genres we have to order Songs or Albums by genre.

Each of these lists shows the minimum information of each element. For example, songs only show title, artist, album, and duration. Each album only has the cover, its name and the artist. There is no possibility to add or remove other columns .

"The application also has a detail that annoys me a lot. When we click the left mouse button in a Metro application, we expect it to perform an action. In this case, if I press a song, it doesn&39;t play but it is selected. To play it I have to press the play button>"

Being from Microsoft, we would expect an application without so many usability bugs.

Let's move on to the next section: the playback interface. Right-clicking anywhere in the application shows a control bar, with Play, Pause, Next and Previous buttons. You cannot rewind or select a specific point in the song.

Of course, that bar comes with a surprise. If you press the cover, it will take you to the Zune-style playback interface. No, I don't see any point in it either and I doubt that many users will find that interface, but there it is.

o, I have not trimmed the sides. This is how the interface appeared on the 4:3 monitor

That full screen, reminiscent of better times, does allow us to rewind, see the playback queue and related artist information. But because we don't stop with the glitches, we can't reorder the listening queue, and if we want to play another song we have to click again twice. And as a tip, it wouldn't hurt if they improved their database of related artists and that repeated artist albums did not appear.

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Let&39;s move on to playlists now. There is no possibility of making them dynamic, and you will have a hard time even rearranging them: the songs are changed with two buttons Go up>"

Lastly, we have the Radio and Explore sections. The first is like Zune's SmartDJ: we put in an artist and it plays related songs.The second shows us the music store with the new, most popular and featured albums. The biggest advantage of this is that you can listen to the complete songs, without cuts or anything.

Xbox Music on the web: Same as desktop

The Xbox Music interface on the web is largely the same as on desktop, except for the Radio and Explore sections that disappear entirely.

Yes, there are some details that improve. For example, hovering the mouse over a song brings up the play, add to playlist, or delete controls. Also, if we make a single click, it plays! We can also drag and drop songs to reorder them or add them to lists.

Yes, it's still a limited app, but at least it's not as usability nonsense as its desktop companion.

Cloud sync: fast but buggy

One of the things that most appealed to me about Xbox Music was the cloud sync. One click and all the music associated between computers and mobiles. The truth is that it works well, but not as much as I expected.

Yes it is true that the association works like lightning. In just over 5 minutes my entire library was synchronized and already appeared on the phone and on the web. The problem came when I began to explore what was on the phone.

And the fact is that the synchronization does not go so well when there are already songs, even more so when Windows Phone decides to rewrite certain labels by default: in this way, several songs that are the same are recognized as different and appear duplicated .

Another bad aspect is the fact that it doesn't let you download all the tracks to the phone at once. I'm not going to be streaming over 3G every time I hear a new song, am I?

Conclusions: Bring me back to the Zune

Zune was cooler.

The synchronization part deserves a pretty good grade. We could say that it is a pity that it does not upload the songs that are not available in the Xbox Music store, but it is that with such a large catalog they have there are no problems.

Synchronization, noticeable. Applications, suspense.

I miss that it is more cross-platform, allowing us to download music directly to other devices. More than synchronizing your music, it is always having it accessible, which is not the same and is not always convenient, especially if you want to use other music applications. As I say, these are details: in general, Xbox Music in the cloud works very well .

Where it fails miserably is in music applications, which couldn't be more basic. It is true that I am very demanding with music players (the only one that convinces me is MediaMonkey), but this is too little.I understand that normal people do not search by composer, or that they do not want to generate dynamic lists based on a few parameters, but with Xbox Music we even lose the ability to say which songs we like and which we hate. If I'm not mistaken, we don't even have the ability to edit tags (at least I haven't found it).

And all this, despite the fact that Microsoft already has experience in music. Zune was a good player, not the most complete but enough to be able to take advantage of it. I cannot accept that Xbox Music is like this knowing who its precursor is.

With the scenario we have, timing can already be great, perfect and infallible. I don't know about you, but with such limited applications I can't consider Xbox Music as an option .