Groove for Windows 10 Mobile update improves the UI, Cortana and Continuum integration

The Groove team have released an update to the Groove app for Windows 10 Mobile which the team describe as “massive”. There are a lot of UI tweaks that improve the usability of the app.

When you view songs and albums you can sort them in the order you added them to your collection (which is now the default view) making it much easier to see your new music. You no longer need to tap the hamburger menu button to bring up the menu you can now swipe in from the left. You can also re-order tracks in a playlist, there is a download progress back and a download menu item in the navigation menu.

With Cortana you can now tell Groove to play a genre of music, e.g. “Play Rock”. When using Continuum the layout has been improved so it looks better on a large screen.

Plenty of minor changes but they add up to a very nice update.

Here are the full list of changes:

• Songs and albums in your collection now sort by the date you’ve added them by default. You can still switch to sorting alphabetically (or by artist in the case of albums).
• You can now swipe from the left to bring up the hamburger menu. It makes it easier to use the app with a single hand!
• Press-hold to re-order tracks within a playlist.
• Previously only plays from your collection would appear in Recent Plays – now it also includes things you’ve played directly from Explore.[Groove Music Pass Required]
• We now show download progress in the title bar, and also provide an entry point to the download manager from within the left nav menu. This aligns with what the Movies & TV app includes.
• Tell Cortana to ‘Play Electronic’ and she will shuffle all your electronic music for you. [where Cortana is supported]
• In the event that, during an upgrade, we need to rebuild the database (this should be very infrequent), we’ll show a little explanatory dialog explaining what’s happening.
• If we detected songs which are duplicated between OneDrive and Music Pass we pop a notification asking if you’d like us to automatically remove them.
• We reverted the recent change to the font size of the song title in Now Playing. It’s smaller now.
• And for Continuum:
  • We’ve updated the layout of the artist gallery to have proper spacing, alignment and remove the color-matched square backgrounds.
  • We’ve added the Explore modules to the Artist Details page at larger resolutions. [Groove Music Pass Required]
  • We’ve updated the layout of Explore at higher resolutions to look correct, and also respond better to scroll wheel. The modules also have a flipper control to allow scrolling within the page. [Groove Music Pass Required]
  • Updates to the Search results page layouts to look good at higher resolutions.
  • Updates to the layout of the Add to menu at higher resolutions.
  • Updates to the layout of the Recent Plays gallery at higher resolutions.