Universal Groove Music app rolling out to all Windows 10 Mobile devices

Last week I wrote about the updated Groove music app that is now a UWP app available for PC and Mobile for Windows Insiders. The app is now available to all Windows 10 Mobile users and is rolling out to via the Windows Store. There are a lot of fixes with this release especially better handling of issues when playing back tracks. Groove is now a very capable music player and has come a long way since the original release.

Here are the 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!