Microsoft Groove updated for Windows Insiders and becomes a universal app

Microsoft’s Groove team have hit a milestone with the development of the music app for Windows 10. The latest update 3.6.1886.0 is a true universal Windows 10 app and will be the exactly the same app on both PC and mobile so that means features like gapless playback will come to Windows 10 PCs. Another change is that that this release is for Windows Insiders to try first before it rolls out to the Windows Store so Insiders can pass on feedback before the app hits all users.

The improvements in this app include better handling of unplayable tracks, they now just grey out and skip over them without displaying an error. It will also tell you why you can’t play certain tracks for example if you are offline trying to play a streaming track and you no longer need an Xbox Live account to use Groove.

Here are the list of changes:

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 sync’ing 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 you have 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 so that it’s seen 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 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!

The known issues are:

• Tapping on the text in the system media transport controls stops playback – just don’t click on the text.
• Music playback error (0xc20200ae) in Groove right after cold start – give a minute and everything should be fine.
• Your file associations may default back to Windows Media Player after this update. You can always reset them by going to Settings/System/Default Apps/Music Player.
• Download of DRM-protected content may fail if your device name contains some non-unicode characters. A workaround is to adjust your device name.

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