News

Groove Music for Windows 10 Mobile Gets Major Updates

By Brian Burgess

Updated September 24, 2023

Microsoft today launched a major update for its Groove Music service, and according to the changelog, there’s a lot going on, and there’s a full changelog!

With all of the updates that Microsoft has been rolling out to its core OS, Windows 10 Mobile, the universal native apps are getting updates, too. Microsoft today launched a major update for its Groove Music service, and according to the changelog, there’s a lot going on.

Groove Music for Windows 10 Mobile Updates

Microsoft employee Ellen Kilbourne posted the following changelog for Groove Music version 3.6.1719.0.

• We made a significant improvement to the way we find your local music and sync your cloud music collection that makes this process much faster. This will cause a one-time rebuild of your collection when you first launch the app after this update.
• We also simplified our logic for hiding duplicates so managing your collection is easier. We’ll no longer match local MP3s to similar ones in OneDrive or your Music Pass collection.
• To make it more clear where your music is coming from, songs are now labeled as OneDrive, Purchased, Music Pass, or Local Only. We show you these in Select Mode (long-press, then Select) to catch you when you need them most.
• We also added the ability for you to see the full set of details on any track with long-press, then Properties.
• We brought back autosuggest when searching in the app and the ability to see everything you’ve searched for since you launched the app.
• We heard your feedback about the ability to see album art in Now Playing so we added a toggle in Now Playing to allow you to choose either album art or artist art.
• We added the ability to sort albums by release year.
• We made playlist editing easier – you can now select multiple items in a playlist and drag them to another spot in the playlist.
• We added better scaling so that images look better on larger devices.
• We added the explicit tag to the list of songs in Now Playing so that it’s easier to see when a song in your queue isn’t playable because it’s explicit.
• We also updated a few things so that the app works better on Continuum:
  • Playback will continue even if the screen locks when using Continuum.
  • We’ve continued to improve layouts of Groove at high resolution (ex: Explore Galleries & Search Results)
• We fixed a number of reliability issues – including the one that temporarily required us to disable ‘sticky pivots’.  With this release we will once again remember what you were doing last and bring you back to the right place the next time you launch Groove.

After the Update

After the update completed on my Lumia 635 running the latest version of the Windows 10 Mobile Insider Update Build 10586.71, the app started over and had to repopulate my playlists and the entire music catalog I have created.

With Windows 10 apps, there is rarely any info included about what is updated. So, in the case of Groove Music on Mobile, it’s nice to see an actual full changelog.

Of course, just like with Windows 10 updates, they will be installed automatically, but if you want to get on top of things when you learn about a new app update, read our article: How to Manually Update Windows 10 Mobile Apps.

If you installed the Groove Music update on your Windows 10 Mobile device, leave a comment below and let us know how things are going for you in the comments below.