As mentioned in my previous post, I've been subscribing to the Zune Music Pass recently, to see how well it suits me and how much use I'll get from it. I have now been subscribing for a little over a month, and as such now seems like a decent time for a quick update on how I'm finding it.
My primary usage has been on my phone. I've been making use of both download and streaming methods of listening. Primarily I will download albums for listening to during my daily commute, but also I've been increasingly streaming music directly rather than downloading.
A nice feature of the Windows Phone client is the ability to save the current track list as a playlist. Doing this doesn't download the tracks, instead it refers directly to the online location of those tracks, which speeds up the entire process should I want to listen again as it avoids the need to search the marketplace first. It only saves a couple of minutes but is very convenient and means I don't have to keep those tracks in my phone memory.
On plugging the phone into my main PC downloaded tracks are copied to the PC library automatically. This isn't quite the behaviour I want but it's not the end of the world. I would guess there is a setting somewhere in the Zune PC software to stop this happening, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable default. Possibly more of an issue in future will be the fact that this also registers the PC as one of the current download devices, of which you are only allowed a finite amount.
The phone interface is simple enough that it's my go-to device, meaning that so far I have not really made much use of streaming music from the web. I did try this near the start of my subscription and I don't recall it being very impressive. This will be something I'd make more use of if I worked from home, but currently not a high priority.
I encountered an issue a few days ago where the phone seemed to lose track that I am an active subscriber. The effect of this was that every track I tried play only had the option to buy, while streaming resulted in 30 second preview clips. This is exactly the same behaviour you would see if not subscribing. I checked my account status online and everything was active, so it appears to just be a glitch in the system. It's not the end of the world as the problem was sorted the following day, but likewise I believe I have seen this behaviour before, so if it happens too often I'll not be overly impressed.
Saturday also saw me finally renewing my Live gold subscription for the Xbox. I had been sitting on a pre-paid code for this for several months, but not having had the time for online gaming recently I was keeping this until such time as I would make more use of it. The tipping point came when I tried to stream a Zune track from my Windows 8 laptop to the Xbox. Not having an active Live Gold account I suspected playback might be prohibited, but then again for £8.90 a month you'd kind of expect this scenario would be an exception (much like the BBC iPlayer).
Apparently not. What the hell Microsoft?!!!
But with this (not insignificant) downside aside, the interface and playback on the Xbox is great. If available the screen cycles through artist photographs on playing tracks (if not then recent or random album covers from your collection are displayed), and the interface is controllable via Kinect voice and movement. It's all very swish. I've only tried streaming tracks, I don't even recall if there is an option to download locally (see the comments or an update later since I'm writing this on my commute, so can't verify this for sure right now).
Going back to the Kinect integration, this is where the killer feature is also found…. almost.
I can regularly be found barking orders to the Xbox (and amusingly more than once I've heard a call from another room asking "who are you talking to?"), but something I'd never bothered doing is searching Bing via voice. I guess I had nothing to look for in the context of the Xbox. Now I do.
With the Zune app there is an option to voice search Bing for music. Calling something like "Xbox, Bing Squeeze" will then launch the Bing app and perform a search for the aforementioned artist… bringing back a list of results for both music and video. This worked first time for the five or so artists I searched for, but I expect plenty of misheard requests going forward. Either way, this king of thing has been available for some time on the Xbox and other Microsoft technologies like Windows Phone, and is a general reason why I tend not to be overly impressed at Siri. Whilst the Siri integration on iOS is better than much of what Microsoft offers on their various platforms, the Microsoft voice algorithms are some of the best around though.
There are also a couple of clues in that last paragraph that explain why the voice search isn't all it promises to be. It's all very impressive, but the integration is not quite there. When asking Bing to perform a search, you have to (confirm) exit the Zune app, you're then dropped into the separate Bing app that performs the search, then put back into the Zune app to play your final selection. Anyone with experience of switching apps on the Xbox will be painfully aware how slow this process can feel.
It's not the end of the world, but it does take the edge off the user experience. I would like to be able to search and queue up music this way without interrupting playback of the current track. Perhaps this will be improved in the next dashboard update… hopefully.
So looking to the future I see on ZD Net that more details have just been revealed about the Xbox Music service that will be coming to Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the next Xbox update. Some of the details have left me a little confused at the moment (like exactly what the problem is running the new software on Windows Phone 7, especially when iOS and Android devices will eventually be covered), but I dare say things will be clearer as I read more, so I'll update in a future posting.
For now though I'm pleased to say that I'm making more use of the service day by day, and once the questions of the upcoming changes to the service make sense to me, I can see myself switching to a yearly subscription. I'm also starting to listen to a lot more recent stuff and classic albums I have missed.
Talking of which, right now I need to search for something else interesting to listen to…
Here's a video from Microsoft on the new service.
• Update: It seems the Xbox is getting updated now, with Windows 8 being updated on 26th October and Windows phone soon after release.
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