Hello, Insiders! We’re releasing an update for Microsoft Groove to the Store - version 3.6.2078.0 of the Groove app will be available for WIP Fast on PC, Phone, and HoloLens soon.

Newness

We now cache your subscription state across app sessions so you’ll be able to sign in to the app much more quickly when you launch it. We also improved the retry logic when connectivity is poor/erratic so that it’s restored more reliably.

We’ve made improvements to background audio so that is should be more reliable and you see it appear to be loading or “buffering” less often.

The process which matches your music to our catalog and allows us to populate artwork and missing metadata can now run in the background - so if you don’t leave the app in the foreground, you’ll still get all the great artwork and metadata.

We are also using a new metadata service, which results in better matching (more artwork, metadata).

With the latest OS builds, you can set theming for all your apps directly in OS Settings > Personalization > Colors. In our app, by default we'll use the OS setting. But you can also choose to set the theme independently, if you want to.

We made a fix so that page titles no longer animate "up" when entering a page. We heard feedback that the experience didn’t feel polished.

We updated the diagnostics tied to Groove feedback submitted in the Feedback Hub so that it’s easier for us to diagnose issues. We also made another round of improvements to our playback telemetry to make it easier for us to investigate.

We made loads of accessibility improvements related to high contrast mode, narrator, and keyboard navigation. We also added a new keyboard shortcut for search - use Ctrl+Q to open the Search box from anywhere in the app.

Known Issues

After signing up for a Groove Music Pass trial, you might have to restart Groove to get the app to recognize your new subscription status.

When using narrator, the "Now Playing" list is positioned in an unexpected place when navigating in item mode.

Hovering over tracks in Now Playing on PC won’t show the usual controls - you’ll have to right-click on the track to complete those actions.

On some devices, you may find the text on an artist’s details page being cutoff.

Please be aware that there are a few issues in the latest WIP Fast flight that are impacting Groove. They are described in Gabe’s recent blog post:

UPDATED: If you have previously played DRM-protected content from services like Groove Music, Movies & TV, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or Hulu, after updating to this build you might no longer be able to playback content from those services – you will instead receive error DRM_E_INVALID_SECURESTORE_PASSWORD(0x8004C029) or DRM_E_DOMAIN_STORE_GET_DATA(0x8004C503). We are working to have this fixed in the near future.

Playing music in the Groove Music within 2 minutes after logging into your PC will result in 0xc10100ae playback errors. If you wait more than 2 minutes after logging in to play music in Groove Music you will avoid this issue.

Thank you so much for all the feedback you’ve provided in this week’s bug bash! See ya in the Feedback Hub!

The Groove Team