Xbox Music to Windows Phone 8 is Garbage

[Nebor]

Ok, I was an early WP7 adopter. You used it with the Zune software, which was probably some of Microsoft's best software ever, and it was all pretty straight forward.

But now, with WP8 and Xbox music, everything is a disaster. Say I have a playlist that I want to put on my phone from my computer. I select it in Xbox Music, go to the "share" charm and click Windows Phone, and it shows all the songs with progress bars and size in megabytes and transfers them. Then when I look at the playlist on my phone, all the songs are listed as "streaming" songs from the cloud (with the little radio symbol.) Despite the fact that I can now look through the library on my phone and see the songs stored both locally and "in the cloud" with the radio symbol. But it defaults to streaming everything. The only way I can figure out to make it stop is to disable streaming music, which is a subpar option because sometimes I want to to stream music.

I just can't believe what a shitty, shitty job MS has done with the Xbox Music, WP8 tie together. Not to mention my Surface, which has a local copy of all my music in it's music library, regularly decides that it needs to download everything from the cloud (6,000 songs.)

How could they have gone from such a good system to such a bad one? It's enormously frustrating. I've heard that Xbox music is better in Windows 8.1, so I have my fingers crossed for that.

 

[Crono]

I agree, Zune was very good. The desktop program was way better than iTunes (not that is saying much).

Xbox Music is better on 8.1, but it's stupid how they split Zune now between Xbox Music, the Windows Phone app, and the Windows Phone app for desktop. Yes, that's 3 programs where before you only needed one. Desktop Zune was near perfect.

I'm having less issues now on 8.1 (preview) versus the initial release of Xbox Music, but I still wish they would have kept Zune. The interface wasn't too complicated and was designed well.

 

[Imaginer]

Agreed. Zune Desktop is great. The "app" feels restricted and as an advertising vehicle, obfuscating my own music and collection to what the service wants to push.

Tried MediaMonkey as a player, it was buggy between playing network files and relinking them.

Went back to Desktop Zune for the time being.

I still drag and drop files to the music folder, but I do want a way to sync things like I had with the Zune HD. (another good device but ditched because so many people trashed that brand in their perception...)

 

[Belegost]

I have actually never used the Xbox music app on Win8. When I want to make a playlist for my phone, I have always used the web interface on music.xbox.com, I have had no problems with my phone picking up the new playlist, and any songs that are already local on the phone play locally.

The disadvantage being that if I want a playlist to be all local (basically always given ridiculously low data limits), I have to manually download any entries not on the phone.