Chapter 4: Xbox Music and Video

In This Chapter

Pitching you Metro Xbox Music and Video

Playing music with Xbox Music

Playing videos with Xbox Video

Managing your playlists

Playing music where you want

Microsoft calls the Windows 8.1, tiled Metro Music app “Xbox Music” for two reasons:

To associate its wildly successful (at least by Microsoft standards) Xbox with its aging and sagging Windows platform: A lot of effort has been expended to make the Windows 8.1 version of its music player look and behave much like the Microsoft Xbox music player.

To make money: That surprises you, yes? In the music and video sphere, Microsoft makes more money by convincing you to buy music and videos — and sign up for expensive Xbox services — with the expectation that the music, videos, and services work on both Windows and the Xbox.

It’s a good marketing move.

Ultimately, the Xbox Music app (on the Xbox) and the Windows 8.1 Metro Music app may look alike, but they don’t work the same way: They’re completely different systems, running on totally different hardware, with utterly different foundations.

On the other hand, if you buy music or videos from Microsoft, the Xbox and Windows can keep track of your music and videos and play them for you, and many efforts are under way to bridge the gap between Windows and Xbox. Windows Phone, too.

Your job is to figure out what’s best for you, and that ain’t easy. Unless, of course, you have an unlimited pocketbook and don’t mind telling the butler to fetch the latest movie on Hulu. Perhaps the maid can prop up the footrest and bring a box of popcorn while he’s at it.

Why You May Want Xbox Music or Video

In some specific situations, Xbox Music and Xbox Video make sense. For example:

If you subscribe to Xbox Music (formerly the Zune Music Pass), the Xbox Music app is a good place to visit all the music you can play. At $9.99 per month, the Xbox Music subscription service is pricey, but there’s a lot of depth, with 30 million songs on file.

If you really, really like the big, colorful advertising or if you’re looking to spend a little loose change on an album or video, the Windows 8.1 Metro apps will definitely give you what you’re looking for.

If you want to stream music or videos directly to your Xbox, the Windows 8.1 Metro Xbox Music or Metro Xbox Video app lets you control the streaming. Just be aware that you have to pay for Xbox LIVE Gold (an additional $60 per year and up; see the nearby “What about Xbox LIVE?” sidebar). Ka-ching.

The Metro Xbox Music app and the Metro Xbox Video app are basically the same app. They work almost identically — pretty typical for media-playing apps.

The two big differences between Metro Xbox Music and Metro Xbox Video are

Metro Xbox Music looks in your Music Library for music files, whereas Metro Xbox Video looks in your Video Library for video files. (See the discussion of libraries in Book VII, Chapter 3.)

Metro Xbox Music lets you purchase music from Microsoft. Metro Xbox Video works the movie side of the street for Microsoft. They’re both hucksters at heart.

The number-one thing you need to know about Metro Xbox Music and Metro Xbox Video is that they’re horrible players, if you’re playing music that you own. Not just bad, but positively wretched. In subsequent sections, I show you why.

If you want to manage and play your music or videos, install VLC on the old-fashioned desktop. VLC is a high-quality barebones player that makes it easy to manage and play your music and videos — all your videos, including DVD movies — and it doesn’t cost a cent. Easy to install and use, too, although it ain’t beautiful. See the sidebar in Book VI, Chapter 7 for details.

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Playing Your Music with Xbox Music

If you’ve never used the Metro Xbox Music app, now’s a good time to give it a try. Follow these steps:

1. On the Start screen, tap or click the Xbox Music tile.

It’s the tile that looks like a pair of headphones. The app scans the music in your Music Library, and then comes up with something like the screen in Figure 4-1.

2. Click X to close out of the All Done notification and the Want to Hear this PC’s Music notification.

The first notification tells you to go to File Explorer to expand your Music Library — a topic I cover in detail in Book VII, Chapter 3.

The second notification tells you about all the wonderful ways you can spend your money with music in the Microsoft cloud.

3. If you have a Windows account, but don’t have an Xbox profile, the Sign In box should appear in the upper right. Tap or click the box that says Sign In.

Figure 4-1: The Xbox Music app.

If you don’t have an Xbox LIVE account (or Xbox profile, which is the same thing), Microsoft asks you to sign up, as in Figure 4-2.

What if you don’t have — and don’t want — a Microsoft account? If you aren’t willing to let Microsoft keep track of all your music, on your computer, Metro Xbox Music isn’t for you. Give up and use VLC Media Player or any of a hundred other media playing apps on the old-fashioned desktop side of the Windows 8 fence.

If you go ahead with registering and Xbox LIVE account, you may as well use the information Microsoft already has on file for you — that’s what appears on the screen — but do yourself a favor and uncheck the Please Spam Me (otherwise known as I’d Like to Receive Information . . .) and Sell My Info to Other Companies (Share My Contact Information with Partners . . .) boxes. Click I Accept.

If all goes well and the Xbox server isn’t down, you return to the main Metro Xbox Music page (see Figure 4-1) with all the notifications removed.

4. If you have any music already on your PC, tap or click one of the album tiles and see how the controls work.

When you play an album, it looks like Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-2: All the tiles, except the ones at the very beginning, are advertise-ments.

Figure 4-3: Playing an album you already own in Xbox Music.

5. The first of the three buttons to the right of the album cover is the Play button. I bet you figured that out already. The + button controls playlists (more about which later in this chapter). The ellipses (. . .) button invites you to Explore Artist. Click or tap on the ellipses, choose Explore Artist, and you bring up a wealth of information, shown in Figure 4-4.

6. For the advanced playback controls, such as they are, go back to the Now Playing pane shown in Figure 4-3 and right-click or swipe up from the bottom.

You see the Metro Xbox Music App bar shown in Figure 4-5. The controls are self-explanatory, I think. The ellipses icon at the bottom marked More lets you delete a song from the playlist (but not from your computer), or show the File Properties dialog box for the song. Playback options in the lower-right corner include repeating the current song and/or shuffling songs on the playlist.

Figure 4-4: The ancillary information about an artist is gorgeous and thorough — and festooned with ads.

Figure 4-5: Straight-forward controls for playback.

7. To see your whole music collection, tap or click the left arrow in the upper-left corner and then tap or click Collection on the left.

From Figure 4-1, you can have Metro Xbox Music sort your collection by Album, Artist, or Song (that’s the first drop-down list); by Music on This PC (actually, in this Music Library), in the cloud, or both (all music); or by Date Added, A to Z, Release Year, Genre, or Artist.

8. Sort a few ways.

For example, instead of showing Songs by Date Added, tap or click the entry at the upper right and then choose A to Z, Genre, or Artist.

The list is long and cumbersome.

When you’re back in the main part of the app, you can tap or click an album cover and, depending on the album, listen to a 30-second preview of most album songs, with an option to buy.

The Radio option on the left of the main screen, Figure 4-1, lets you build a "radio" station that adapts itself to your likes and dislikes. If you think that sounds a lot like Pandora (www.pandora.com), well it is. Pandora invented the concept in 2005, Microsoft borrowed it — as have many others. The free version of Metro Xbox Music Radio plays ads fairly frequently. If you have an Xbox Music Pass, the ads go away. If you venture outside the United States, you may or may not be able to use the Radio.

The Explore option on the left of the main screen lets you, uh, explore buying fabulous new stuff from Microsoft. Oh boy.

I won’t bore you with a guided tour of the rest of the app. The meager play controls (Shuffle, Repeat, Previous, Pause, and Next) are shown in Figure 4-5. That’s almost all there is to it, unless you want to buy something from Microsoft.

Viewing Your Videos with Xbox Video

Promise me you won’t get bored.

The Metro Xbox Video app works almost exactly like the Music app. Here’s a quick recap:

1. Tap or click the Metro Xbox Video tile.

You see an app that really wants you to buy or rent a movie. Way over on the left, your videos appear — assuming you have videos in the Windows Video Library. See Figure 4-6.

Many people store videos from their phones and cameras inside the Pictures Library. That’s a good place to put them — the Windows 8.1 tiled Pictures app, Windows Media Player, and VLC will find them there. But the Xbox Video app doesn’t look through the Pictures Library.

Figure 4-6: The Metro Xbox Video app shows some of your videos but mostly wants to sell, sell, sell.

2. Tap or click the My Videos link at the upper left. You may have to scroll, scroll, scroll to get there.

A scrollable list of tiles appears, as shown in Figure 4-7.

3. In the Date Added drop-down list, choose a sort option such as A to Z or Duration.

4. Tap or double-click a video to play it. When you’re done, tap or click the back arrow in the upper-left corner to return to the movie tiles (Figure 4-7) and tap or click again to go back to the main Xbox Video page (Figure 4-6).

5. On the main page, to buy a movie, or play a trailer on your computer or Xbox, tap or click it.

The movie trailers are identical to what you see on www.rottentomatoes.com, except Rotten Tomatoes usually has several trailers for each new release.

Plans are afoot to have the Metro Xbox Video app supply you with movie show times, and even let you buy tickets online — Microsoft gets its cut, of course. Those features weren’t available as this book went to press.

Figure 4-7: Videos appear as a scrollable group of tiles.

A word to the wise: watch the terms of movie rentals and purchases, very closely. As we went to press, some Metro Xbox Movie purchases timed out on a specific date: After that date, you can’t download or stream them, even though you’ve paid for them and haven’t even watched them. Rental terms are the worst in the business: You have to start watching a rented film within two weeks and finish watching it within 48 hours. From my point of view, it’s obvious that Microsoft isn’t the least bit interested in offering reasonable terms on either. With so many alternatives — Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and many more — why put up with it?

Managing Playlists

The Metro Xbox Music app has a rudimentary playlist capability. A playlist is just a list of songs that the app is supposed to play in order. I have a detailed discussion of playlists, such as how to create and maintain them, in Book VI, Chapter 7.

Remarkably, any playlist that you create in a different app, such as Windows Media Player or VLC, works great in the Metro Xbox Music app. You just have to make sure you put the WPL file — the file that contains the playlist — in your Music library.

Unfortunately, the Metro Xbox Video app doesn’t support playlists. If you have kids in the household, you know how useful video playlists can be. Oh well. YouTube still lets you create and maintain video playlists — and it doesn’t cost anything. My Roku does better.

You can create a playlist in the Metro Xbox Music app in several ways. Here’s the easiest:

1. In the Metro Xbox Music app (Figure 4-1), tap or click the New Playlist link on the left.

A small box invites you to type a name for the playlist.

2. Type a name for your new playlist and tap or click Save.

The playlist appears on the screen, but there are no instructions or any indication of how to add songs to the playlist.

3. Click or tap on the new playlist.

Metro Xbox Music brings up an empty list of songs, as in Figure 4-8.

4. Now go find songs you want to add to the playlist. If you want to buy them, click the Explore Music link in the middle of the screen. If you want to add songs you already own (imagine that), tap or click the Collection link on the left.

Figure 4-8: A new but very empty playlist.

5. When you find a song you want to add, click or tap to highlight it, click or tap the + sign to the right of the song’s name, and choose the name of the playlist you wish to add it to.

Yeah, it’s weird. See Figure 4-9.

6. You can choose individual songs to play from the playlist by choosing the playlist on the left and then right-clicking or swiping from the bottom. In the Metro Xbox Music App bar, you can play, adjust the volume, or play the previous song.

As best I can tell, there’s no way to rearrange the songs in a playlist, to add a song to the middle of a playlist, or to merge or split playlists.

When you play a playlist, you can remove an individual song from the playlist by tapping or right-clicking it and, in the App bar, choosing Remove from Playlist.

Figure 4-9: Adding a song to a playlist.

Turning Off the Tiled Apps as Default Media Players

One last little trick. This bugs the bewilickers out of me.

I’m rifling through a bunch of songs (or movies or other media) on the desktop side of Windows, and absent-mindedly tap or double-click a song. Windows doesn’t play the song in Windows Media Player. Noooooh. It flips to Xbox Music and plays the song there. Bah! Humbug! That’s the last place I want to play a song.

I think the best solution to this problem is to install VLC (see the sidebar in Book VI, Chapter 7), and have it handle all your media files, which is an option during the installation. If you prefer Windows Media Player, you can tell Windows that Media Player should handle your media instead.

To keep your double-clicked music from playing in the Xbox Music app, follow these steps:

1. On the desktop side of the fence, in File Explorer, find a music file.

You can probably start in your Music library. You definitely want to make this change for MP3 files, but if you use other music file formats (OGGs, for example), repeat these steps for each file type.

2. Right-click or tap and hold on the music file, and then choose Open With⇒Choose Default Program.

Windows shows you the options in Figure 4-10.

Figure 4-10: Keep Xbox Music (identified here as just “Music”) away from your MP3 files!

3. Choose Windows Media Player, or if you have a better music file player, choose More Options and find the player you want.

From that point on, every time you tap or double-click an MP3 file (or OGG, or whatever you’ve chosen), Windows doesn’t send you off to Metro Xbox Music gaga land.

Score one for the good guys.