Published by Steve Litchfield at 19:49 UTC, December 9th 2015

A veritable feast of tweaks to Microsoft's official music player for Windows 10, Groove Music, after a gap of a month, but it's all available now, so go get it and enjoy. Intriguing in the changelog is that you can swipe in from the left to bring up the hamburger menu. Wait, what? Why the heck can't Microsoft do this with all its other platform applications? We should be told...

Here's the official changelog for Groove Music v3.6.1573.0 since the previous update:

Songs and albums in your collection now sort by the date you’ve added them by default. You can still switch to sorting alphabetically (or by artist in the case of albums).

You can now swipe from the left to bring up the hamburger menu. It makes it easier to use the app with a single hand!

Press-hold to re-order tracks within a playlist.

Previously only plays from your collection would appear in Recent Plays – now it also includes things you’ve played directly from Explore. [Groove Music Pass Required]

We now show download progress in the title bar, and also provide an entry point to the download manager from within the left nav menu. This aligns with what the Movies & TV app includes.

Tell Cortana to ‘Play Electronic’ and she will shuffle all your electronic music for you. [where Cortana is supported]

In the event that, during an upgrade, we need to rebuild the database (this should be very infrequent), we’ll show a little explanatory dialog explaining what’s happening.

If we detected songs which are duplicated between OneDrive and Music Pass we pop a notification asking if you’d like us to automatically remove them.

We reverted the recent change to the font size of the song title in Now Playing. It’s smaller now.

And for Continuum: We’ve updated the layout of the artist gallery to have proper spacing, alignment and remove the color-matched square backgrounds. We’ve added the Explore modules to the Artist Details page at larger resolutions. [Groove Music Pass Required] We’ve updated the layout of Explore at higher resolutions to look correct, and also respond better to scroll wheel. The modules also have a flipper control to allow scrolling within the page.[Groove Music Pass Required] Updates to the Search results page layouts to look good at higher resolutions. Updates to the layout of the Add to menu at higher resolutions. Updates to the layout of the Recent Plays gallery at higher resolutions.



You can update Groove Music in the usual way in the Store application for Windows 10 Mobile, either on a Lumia 950/XL or an older device with the W10M Insiders Preview installed.

Here's the new version in action:

The database of music in your phone is rebuilt after updating - allow about five minutes for a large collection of music....; (right) I like the way Microsoft has started to build changelog summaries into each app update nowadays....

Asking Cortana to play a music genre and (right) using the very welcome new slide-out hamburger menu - let's have this across all core apps, please, Microsoft!