Xbox Music Improvements for WP 8.1 Coming April 22nd

Microsoft are busy at working making WP 8.1 even better (showing that this is indeed a “Beta” preview) unlike GDR3 which was fully cooked upon release. On the Microsoft community blog they’ve posted about some upcoming changes to the Xbox music app (which has gotten pretty bad); these changes are expected to come the week of the 22nd of April (next week)

• Numerous stability fixes, including many of the reported black screens
• Cortana integration is complete and now supports playing playlists by name
• UI polish to improve animations and transitions between UI views
• Improved messaging for encountered errors, such as unplayable content in collections
• Background initial sync of local and cloud content

Future releases will focus on

• Continued focus on Stability and Performance
• Live Tile integration
• Quickplay improvements, including “recent” lists
• Kids Corner Support
• UX improvements (Search result grouping, creating new Radio Stations, improved Network status messages, Blue UI language alignment, now playing improvements and more)

For me I was pretty happy to finally get Podcast support (although a lot of podcasts are searchable but can’t be downloaded for some reason; example: Sawbones); but the app definitely needs some work. If you have a suggestion for Microsoft leave it at the link below:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp8-wpmusic/xbox-music-windows-phone-81-developer-preview/0c807637-cb4c-4957-a81e-6cb86571501b

Category: Nokia