Groove Music ditches Xbox Live on Windows 10 Mobile; Brings Some Major Changes

Groove Music is one of the apps that people have cursed big time, but it looks like The next major update on the way to Groove Music will set them free as it becomes a true universal app on Windows 10 with shared code. Microsoft engineer Ellen Kilbourne shared on Twitter that this is going all out to consumers.

While one of the major changes in the app is that you don’t need Xbox Live integration, and it now acts as a standard player on the Phone for anybody to use. However, when you sign-in with your Microsoft account, the magic of Groove kicks in. Here is the list of improvements that you will notice—many things that I want to ask you to sit and explore.

Improvements to playback including:
- When unplayable tracks appear in Now Playing, we properly gray them out and jump over them without displaying an error.
- We prevent you from playing unplayable content (for instance, if you are offline and try to play a streaming album, we won’t try to play it, we’ll immediately tell you it can’t be played and why)
- We added extra telemetry to playback errors so that we can continue to improve the app.

We removed the app’s dependencies on Xbox Live, which means you don’t need an Xbox Live account to use Groove (and sign-in is much faster and more reliable)!
It’s easier to tell what’s happening when Groove is syncing your collection for the first time.
You’ll see “Unknown Artists” less often in your collection because the app looks at both song artist and album artist metadata.

The process we use to show additional metadata to what’s in your local files is 10x faster and gives better results.
The app defaults to Explore for search results if you have a Groove Music Pass and don’t have a limited data plan.
When viewing artists, you can view their work by albums or songs. Try it by selecting “Songs view” when viewing an artist.

Radio stations can be started from albums and songs – the app will start the radio based on the artist.
The app now shows your collection size at the top of the collection views.
On mobile, background art fills the screen to see under the system icons at the top.

You can use ‘Refine’ to filter your collection by source (OneDrive, Pass, Purchased, On this device only).
If something gets really out of whack in your collection, you can now choose to ‘Reset’ your cloud collection.
We added jumplist support for collection views organized by the release year.

The ‘hotlinks’ in Album reviews and Artist bios now work on mobile.
We added a simple lockscreen setting for Continuum. We made lots of styling updates for Continuum too!