Groove Music for Windows 10 Mobile gets massive update with new features, tweaks and improvements

News
By
last updated

Right now, Microsoft is pushing out a rather large update for their Groove music app on Windows 10 Mobile (not for PC). The update brings with it a rather hefty changelog of 15 items showing that the Groove team is hard at work at bringing this app up to speed.

Version 3.6.1573.0 is now live in the Store and while you wait you can peruse the changelog.

Groove 3.6.1573.0

  • 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.

Continuum support is also updated with the following changes:

  • 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.

Perhaps the most fun new feature is the ability to swipe to bring up the hamburger button instead of tapping it the corner. This move obviously makes one-handed usage much better, and something users have been asking for system-wide in Windows 10 Mobile.

Unfortunately, Groove lockscreen support is still not there. Microsoft's Ellen Kilbourne notes that an OS update will be needed to make that happen, so hopefully it's not too far off.

The Groove update is now live!

Download Groove app for Windows 10 Mobile

Source: Microsoft

CATEGORIES
Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.