The Windows 8 Consumer Preview had a trio of media-oriented apps—Music, Videos, and Photos—and they left a lot to be desired. They lived up to their billing as "app previews," being little more than proofs-of-concept rather than fully fledged apps. While the Photos application remains disappointing, the Release Preview incarnations of the Music and Video apps are much more substantial and usable. In common with their Consumer Preview counterparts, they're not just for playing your own music and videos; they're also a storefront for buying or renting media. In the Consumer Preview, the branding was for the most part Zune-related. But that's almost all gone now. Microsoft unveiled its plans for an Xbox-branded music and video store yesterday at its pre-E3 briefing. Xbox-branded the services may be, but Xbox-specific they are not: the Xbox name will be found splashed across Windows 8 and phone apps.

The look-and-feel will be aligned, too. Microsoft has only shown a glimpse of the Xbox's Music and Video interface, but what little has been shown looks almost identical to the Windows 8 apps, and we can only expect the two to become even more similar as their development proceeds.

The Audio and Video apps themselves also look very similar to each other. This goes above and beyond being Metro-styled: they are essentially the same application, and if you can find your way around one, you'll be familiar with the other.

In both apps, the sales pitch is front and center. Sure, they can both be used to play your existing media, but you get the feeling that that's not really what they're here for. These apps are for selling you new stuff. Start up the Music app and you'll be shown a load of albums that you don't own, and a bunch of tiles for new releases. The Video app likewise: all the latest movie releases for you to rent or buy.

Clicking through to an artist or film will pop up a pane of information about the thing you clicked, and you can drill down to get more information (for example, you can browse an artist's back catalog) or movie trailers. Exactly what you get to see will depend on where you live (or rather, the country that your Microsoft Account is tied to—and in spite of how central these accounts are to the entire Windows experience, you still can't move them between countries), so trailers and detailed artist information aren't available to all. But they are to some.

The organization of the whole thing feels a little strange. Music has sections for new releases and popular albums, for example, but there's no obvious way to just start browsing by category or artist the way you could at a brick-and-mortar store. This seems strange; what if I'm not interested in what's new or popular, but just want to browse the electronica selection?

The preferred approach, I guess, is to use the Search charm and search the store. This works, but this Windows 8 approach still feels quite alien to me. After years of training, I expect a task such as searching music to be done from within the Music app. I look for a text box with a magnifying glass icon. But in Windows 8 you don't do that. You bring up the charms—which to my mind are logically connected to the system and not the application—and hit search—again a system-wide feature, not an application feature—and then tell the search to search the Music store.

This feels bizarre. If I'm already in the Music app, why would I want to break out of that just to find some songs? Browsing music also tends to feel a little dreary. If I'm just looking through my songs (rather than browsing albums or artists) I get a thoroughly uninspiring gray spreadsheet.

Actual playback in both apps feels quite Zune-inspired. There's a nice full-screen "Now Playing" view that shows either the video you're watching or the relevant album art. Except even here, the hard sell is not far off. In Zune, the app would show you a neat mosaic of all the album art you have, with a nice colorized effect. The Music app does the same thing... except instead of showing you your album art, it shows you album art from the "popular" section of the store. I don't know why anyone would ever want to see that.

The transition away from the Zune branding isn't complete, either. Microsoft's subscription music service is still described as a Zune pass within the Music app. No doubt this will change. Purchases are also denominated in Microsoft Points; a move away from points has long been anticipated, but it's not there yet.

The split between video and music feels a little awkward. The Music app has playlists. The Video app does not. While this makes sense much of the time, it doesn't always. Want to a cue up a few episodes of a TV show to watch back-to-back? That doesn't seem to be an option. It is in the venerable Windows Media Player desktop application. This is something of a recurring theme. Want to edit some ID3 tags, or rip a CD? You can do it in Windows Media Player; you can't in the new apps. DVD playback similarly isn't an option, and indeed, it's not even a feature of the desktop application unless you buy Microsoft's media pack for Windows 8. The apps feel like they're designed for a sealed ecosystem: as long as you buy your media from the Xbox store, and are happy to live within its world, you'll have all the right tags and album art and so on. But if you want to bring in something from outside that ecosystem, too bad. The apps aren't going to help out. Metadata management is generally poor. Windows has long been difficult in this area. Although the operating system includes support for ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, both widely used to label MP3s, it doesn't support the latest ID3v2.4 specification. A specification that's a mere 11 and a half years old now. Even files with ID3v2.3 tags, which it does understand, don't appear to get indexed reliably. The Video app is also quite picky about what files it can play back. Again, this won't ever be a problem for anyone who lives within the safe confines of the store, but if you get your media from other sources there's a fair chance that it won't play in the Video app. The video APIs that Microsoft offers to Metro-style applications are limited, and only support a narrow selection of file types and compression schemes. Windows Media Player is not only more flexible, it's also more extensible, allowing the use of third-party compression schemes.

In so many ways, these applications are a taste of the future. There's the laudable—and I think desirable—unification of Microsoft's platforms: a common set of applications, with a common look-and-feel, across Xbox 360, Windows 8, Windows Phone, and even non-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft, at least, is unafraid to use the Xbox branding in conjunction with Windows, and giving consumers a single vision rather than a set of disparate, different services. But there's also the downside: the growth of the sealed system. The media apps work quite well if you stick with Microsoft's content ecosystem. But as soon as you venture beyond that, it becomes clear: these are not well-rounded media applications, and they're not on the same level as Windows Media Player or iTunes; not even close. They're for consuming media originating from Microsoft, with everything else taking a back seat, if it's even possible at all.