Xbox Music is cheap if you pay for a year in advance. You really only pay for 10 months and get 2 months free. There is a 1 month trial of Xbox Music available if you have never used it. Try it out and see for yourself.
Spotify or Xbox music subscription, which is better.
or
Spotify or Xbox music non subscription? as options
I use Shazam to find songs I like then buy via Xbox or go to Spotify.
Currently using Spotify as I was Android, but thinking of going to Xbox music
Cheers
I tried the Xbox music free trial when I first got my Lumia. I found it to be reasonably good but found it frustrating as hell on Window's 8, as making play lists on the phone isn't intuitive and I only discovered how to do it by accident from memory. Thus I cancelled after the end of the trial and am now a spotify premium subscriber. I find spotify better as it already works perfectly across my Lumia, Windows 8 Laptop and iPad.
I would definitely encourage you to try the free trial for yourself first though, because you may find that you like it.
I used to use Spotify, but their support for Windows Phone is so rotten (check their forums for the world's longest ignored support thread I've ever seen), I was extremely pleased to switch to Xbox Music when that arrived.
Now it's all I use and I don't even load or sync music to my devices any other way. I fact I moved my old music folder to a spare drive away from my music library so that it doesn't even get mixed up with it (this is worth doing in advance of setting up Xbox Music so that it doesn't load all your existing tracks to the cloud). This has helped me find loads of new bands and get back into enjoying music again.
Both are missing a lot of bands, but both have many more to discover. I think it's well worth it.
Note that Spotify has the whole social integration, which drives me batty.. but you might want that. The desktop Spotify app experience is also a different kettle of fish from Xbox, which is pretty simple.
You get a month free on btoh I think, so you can try it out.
robax: Now it's all I use and I don't even load or sync music to my devices any other way. I fact I moved my old music folder to a spare drive away from my music library so that it doesn't even get mixed up with it (this is worth doing in advance of setting up Xbox Music so that it doesn't load all your existing tracks to the cloud). This has helped me find loads of new bands and get back into enjoying music again.
Interested in this definitely, so you moved the destination folder location of the original Windows music folder or created and new one on the other drive?
Just to recap for anyone thinking about this... first time through with a Win 8 desktop, a WP8 phone, and a Win 8 tablet, I just left everything as I had always done.. with a huge number of files in My Music.. and if you do that, Xbox does that thing where it scans your collection and puts stub files everything in the cloud so that you can access it from all your devices.
That may be good for some, but I definitely did not want thousands of randomly collected old tracks available on all my devices, especially when they would need to be streamed - That's fine around the house, but not on the phone.
On my phone I just wanted the things I wanted to listen to and nothing else. So with great difficulty I managed to clear out the cloud collection and start all over again. And this time I just moved everything from My Music to a folder elsewhere. I didn't change the folder location in Windows.. just got the files out of the music library altogether... and to tell you the truth, I haven't even looked at them since.
It's a great way to start recreating a library of music you really want to listen to and not be faced with tons of old music randomly collected over many years. I still listen to some of my old favourites, but now I just get them off Xbox as and when I want them.. no more messing around with files. And I don't have to worry when I delete something to make space, because I can just get it back again. I didn't like the idea of paying a subscription for music, but I'm sold on it now, mainly because it's cheap enough.
Once you have a clear music library, then you set up Xbox music pass on your desktop and on the phone after. In the settings for both, you can tell it to download music from one device to the other and the phone will only do it on wifi. I have that disabled for my phone, but enabled for my desktop and tablet. The point is that I want to control what's on the phone.
If you have made the mistake of setting it up with a full music library and you now have thousands of track listings clogging up your phone, you can try setting everything to fully sync, then clear the music library out and wait until everything is gone. I still had to remove many items manually and that is laborious because there's no bulk delete.
So.. yes the simple answer is just clear out your Music library before setting up Xbox Music Pass and then use Xbox music in favour of your old library for adding music back in.
If XBox doesn't have a certain album you really want to listen to, then you always drag it in from your own files. Rob
I see Nokia are putting a few of their own twists into the WP8 phones. Double tap to wake up and the on screen clock ala the N9. Also the internet radio feature is going to be unlocked.
Robax, I think you could have achieved what you've done by just changing the default 'My Music' location. Adding more folders and setting this up, and changing away from the default (not shown in my pic which IS the default) - is really easy in Win7 (big improvement over XP) - and no doubt in W8 too...
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