Xbox Music Book: A Small Update, Some Thoughts on Music Match

The problem with the lack of a scan-and-match method is that synced playlists end up having missing songs. =/

Sorry, but I've given up on the Music app in Windows 8 because MS is insulting their customers:

1. As of the latest update, if you don't have an xbox music pass, it will insert ads into your music. Yes that's right YOUR MUSIC. Not streaming music like spotify free accounts, YOUR OWN DAMN MUSIC.

2. As of the latest update, every hour it stops your music, asks if you're there still and tells you that you need to pay up for an xbox music account if you want this "feature" to go away.

I'm sorry but this is the default music app for PLAYING MUSIC on all Windows 8 machines and it's FULL OF CRAPWARE. MS you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!

Your Video codec support is AWEFUL. I mean REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD. H264 plays sometimes, won't stream unless the file is in the perfect layout in an mp4 file.

Your splitter support is AWEFUL. AVI, MP4 and M2TS only? Seriously? Every other player supports MKV other than apple crap. Fix it. It's 100% free, so you have no excuse not to have it native to the environment.

Your audio support is even worse:

1. DTS doesn't work, dispite claims to the contrary by MS.
2. No support for bitstreaming DTS HD and Dolby TrueHD. There is NO COST if you don't decode these and simply bitstream them. There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for these not working out of the box.
3. If you have an m4v file with DTS HD or True HD and AC3 (or AAC) in it (all supported by the standard I might add) it will insist on trying to play the audio streams that it doesn't support (DTS, DTS HD and AC3)
4. Not that I care, but no ogg/vorbis support.

Thus it's impossible to get around the massively pathetic limitations and have something it CAN play and allow other players that do support the basics to play them.

Then there is the complete lack of ability to play from any network connected storage unless it's on Windows Server or another Windows 8 machine and indexed even though the apps are fully capable of accessing network shares if they wanted and indexing them themselves just like Windows Media Player.

Of course they didn't provide us with a Windows 8 Media Center app, which they should be working on feverishly.

So in summary, Windows 8 supports exactly the same standards as the Xbox 360 does. Yes, that's right, a device that is like 8 years old at this point has the same capabilities of a 3 month old OS.

And the apps are CRAP compared to what they replace (WMP is FAR better in every respect as is Zune) AND there is advertisements and nags to force you to PAY TO PLAY YOUR OWN FREAKING MUSIC!

Heck, I can't even rate my music tracks in the music app. And I can't rate them from the now playing toast (which is a no-brainer!). By not allowing me to do this, I can't easily sync my favorite songs to Windows Phone so that I only get the best of the best on my phone to save space. (I won't even get into how bad the Windows 8 phone sync is.)

MS: I WOULD PAY extra for things you need to license from others. (Ogg upsell if I try and play an ogg file, DTS upsell if I try and DECODE a DTS track, etc. would be fine with me.) What I absolutely WON'T DO is pay to play my own music on my own computer without any interactions with your stupid services that I have no interest in.

I don't use Xbox 360 for the same reason. It sits collecting dust because they want to force me into a gold account. I understand it on the Xbox 360 because they sell it at a loss. But my PC? I paid full price for it, and paid for the upgrade of Windows 8 from the full price I paid for Windows 7. MS has ABSOLUTELY NO SKIN IN THE GAME and thus has NO RIGHT to force me to pay for crap every month just to make their advertising go away.

As of right now I've tried all of the players in the app store, and they're crap so there is no alternatives either.

These "features" they're adding are not useful. They need to get the basic apps working so that they replace what was in Windows already. If they want to offer their services and offer to purchase tracks online etc. great! But don't get in my face, and let me turn off that crap. And don't you DARE try and force me to pay for crap that doesn't work, and doesn't handle the most basic of functionality and standards. You'll lose me to Apple in a heart beat, because if I need to pay for this crap, then I might as well use the system that actually has a huge user base and thus far more apps etc.

This article and your book has been very helpful. Thanks for the details! By chance does anyone know how the artist are compensated for their work on Xbox Music?

I think my biggest questions are these:

Xbox Music is obviously auto-matching, but in the top right corner it says "Downloading 7,153 songs." What the hell is it downloading and to where? I've already got the MP3 files on my computer..

Second, does anyone with a significant music collection on their PC have an easy time browsing/selecting music to play on their Xbox 360?

Zune and the Zune HD were far superior to xbox music. The fact that this much explanation has to be made in order to use/understand the service is an obvious failure.

On a positive note, I feel if MS made it simple and "just worked", Paul Thurrott wouldn't have as much research and writing to do. I'm glad you do it Paul, cause I'd never have the patience to try and understand MS. In your words, it's just "f'n nuts"

1. No it doesnt have to match all songs because I had some albums by various artists got matched wrong because they had a few songs in common with other albums.

It can also be turned off in prefrences whcih is what I have done.

2. Since the latest update ive realised it no longer shows the "explore artist" when you match a song from the "Dont see your album here" section. To get around this you have to match it to one on the main screen let it sync and then select the album from the other section.

The thing that makes iTunes halfway decent is Gracenote. I think I have only had 2 or 3 albums of the 900+ in my collection fail to be recognised. This includes many compilation albums. MS needs to get Gracenote and ditch whatever service it currently uses.

Compilation albums is the biggest problem for Xbox music matching. It sees the individual tracks as part of an incomplete album rather than part of a compilation.

Some time ago I ran a program called Music Brains Picard which provided a rating on the likelihood of a match to a specific album. This isn't my thing, but I think that music files have some sort of 'fingerprint' that can be read and matched to the metadata of a database. What I saw was, best of albums, e.g. David Bowie would match the track to the original album rather than the best of compilation. I suspect this fingerprint carried over from the master track/recording.