I'm sorry to have to say this but so far Groove is truly woeful - why are we getting worse and worse music apps with every new release of Windows?

I installed the insider release of Windows 10 over the weekend and while I do understand this is a pre-release the excruciating amount of really fundamental bugs makes me wonder what you guys are doing over there. :-(

(Just so you know, I have a Lumia 1520 with a Sandisk 128GB SD card which has around 11,000 mp3 tracks on it.)

Here are the issues, that like many others, I'm facing:

1. As so many others have complained about, big collections of music from SD card will not load. My phone tried THREE times to import my music library and each time I left it to do it's thing, but when I came back the next day (or reset the phone after an update) it was gone - and then mysteriously, seemingly at random, it just starts indexing again.

UPDATE: I now have the very latest release and have tried again tonight, this time not letting the app close or the phone go on standby until it had completed and all my music now seems to be there (less tags and most artwork - see below) so hopefully this is now fixed. But I'll only be convinced if I go into Groove tomorrow and it's still all there. Please consider doing what many people have asked and have a user option to force a rebuild of the library - and allow it to run in the background properly without locking up or giving up if the device goes on standby!!

2. At *least* 50% of my artwork is not displayed. Question: Why can I load the EXACT same collection of MP3 tracks into ANY Apple device or any standard Android device or Windows Media Player or VLC (etc, etc) and see my artwork but I can't in Groove? Surely if all these other apps can do it so can Groove? These are bog standard JPG's in bog standard MP3 files - I just fail to understand how hard it can be to show these.

3. *All* my compilations (and I have lots of them) show "unknown artist" despite every single track having the correct artist applied. I have written my own player in XAML and C# and mine gets ALL the tags and artist names correct so I simply can't understand why Microsoft can't achieve this with all the expertise you have. (Maybe you need to employ me to take over as the lead developer!)

4. There is no way to *easily* listen by genre. This is a really awful oversight and when you search the feedback in the phone app there are countless people asking for this to be restored to the main hamburger menu (which I think is awful UX for an app like this btw). And yes, I know you can do it through the filter, but this is over-complicating what should be a simple user experience. I do not want to have to go into a silly filter to do this - I just want to select the genre and have those tracks play - please put this back ASAP (but only after fixing fix the fundamental bugs above!)

5. Playlists are, in a word, pathetic. I was hoping we could (finally) build at least semi-intelligent playlists like iTunes has where you can fill in some filters and it adds the music automatically. (e.g: all tracks with genres = 'Jazz" or "Blues" or "World" or "All tracks with year between 1980 and 1989" for an 80's playlist.) Do you have any idea how clumsy it is trying to add (using the above example) over 200 blues, jazz and world albums into a playlist? In the app I wrote myself I achieve exactly this sort of thing by querying the Track model based on some some input controls the user selects - so in future versions I really hope Groove can give us some way to create playlists more intelligently.

6. Can't remove it or make another app the default player. I understand it's complicated as there is deep integration across the phone and with the cloud, Bluetooth, etc but give Developers a spec for a default player and if it passes the store acceptance test then let users have it as the default player so we're not locked into what Microsoft think we want (but seemingly screw up every time).

I do appreciate this app is a work in progress but Windows 10 has been out for ages and everything is meant to be universal now - I'm sorry to be so brutal how are you guys getting this so hopelessly wrong on the phone platform?

On a much more positive note I do have to say I *love* Windows 10 as a whole and now have every MS device I own or use (3 PC's, 2 notebooks and 2 phones) on W10 and would not go back.... but I do spend a lot of my time listening to music on my devices so Groove is the single biggest (massive!) let down for me so far.

Here's hoping over time, with user feedback and a lot more development, it does turn into the app it could and should be.



