Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

The Xbox Music App – Still Disaster-Prone

Well, I thought at first that the new release of the Xbox Music App for Windows 8 was promising. That is, until my recent bad experience, and now something else has crept out of the woodwork.

The App is working as expected on my Desktop PC, but on my Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, when I start playing an album, the first track will play, but all the rest start showing an error symbol (an exclamation mark) by them:

If I click on the symbol, then I get this:

It says:

Can’t play.

Please try again. If the problem continues, visit www.xbox.com/support to check for guidance.

more info

Tell Microsoft more about this problem

0xc00d11cd (0x8000ffff)

Once again, of course, the links provided in the error message don’t provide any guidance whatsoever.

If I let the playback continue, it will stop at the end of the currently playing track, because all the rest of the tracks are showing errors. However, I can manually advance to the next track, and it will start playing (with all the following tracks continuing to show errors):

Interestingly, I’m not the only one with this issue. And what I seem to have in common with the others is that we are using tablets built with the Intel Clover Trail chipset. This issue may well have been there for some time; it’s only with the latest release of the Xbox Music App (1.2.150.0) last week that I’ve really been using the App – it was so absymal before. It appears that it’s still dreadful.

All my music (which is DRM-free) is stored on my Windows Home Server 2011 system. As I say, the Xbox Music App works fine on my Desktop PC, which, like my Tablet, is also running Windows 8 Pro. Other music applications, both traditional Desktop Apps (e.g. Windows Media Player, Zune and Media Monkey), and Modern UI Apps (e.g. Media Monkey for Windows 8) work fine on both the Desktop PC and my Tablet.

But the Xbox Music App on the Tablet continues to be absolutely abysmal.

April 2, 2013

Categories:

Computers and Internet

Windows 8

5 responses to “The Xbox Music App – Still Disaster-Prone”

Greg Luhman

April 4, 2013

Nice write up. I am seeing this issue with streaming tracks from the cloud.

Reply
Dave A. Kowalski

April 4, 2013

Hi Greg — I have found a functional workaround for this issue. PLEASE HELP with getting as many people as we can to make enough noise to get some attention for this huge flaw.

The workaround has been posted on the MS Answers thread you were posting in:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/zune/forum/xboxapp/xbox-music-app-win8-still-incapable-of-playing/02ba3d13-f2b3-4c09-b99e-2179aa5d2c9e?tm=1365099457426

Reply
1. Dave A. Kowalski
  
  April 4, 2013
  
  Sorry, that was to OP Geoff, but Greg, if you see the link, it will help you too!
  
  Reply
2. Geoff Coupe
  
  April 4, 2013
  
  Dave – thanks for this tip. I turned off hardware acceleration, and the error disappeared. I turned acceleration back on, and the error returned. So indeed, you have discovered a workaround. Thank you.
  
  Now, we need the Xbox Music App team in Paris, France, to get off their derrières, and fix this properly
  
  Reply
adc

September 22, 2014

I am only interested in the music aspects of Xbox — I have no interest in gaming at all. I have two 8.1 PC’s, an 8.1 RT tablet, and an 8.1 phone — and I truly despise x-box music! Zune was far superior in so many ways. It was intuitive and easy to use — and it worked! Xbox music is a disaster, I seriously do not have the time to list all of the problems I have experienced. In a nutshell, trying to have one app that does too many things is a serious problem. The entire concept behind apps is for each app to do very well the small number of tasks it is designed to do. Xbox fails miserably, as it is designed to be the do-all for too many things, and it does none of them well. Break Xbox apart into selected apps that each handle one generalized task so that each app can do its tasks well! In my case, I want an app that seamlessly handles my music on all of my devices. In this capacity, Xbox fails miserable. I am not a novice in the online software/hardware arena — indeed, I am very experienced. I have paid my dues, tried valiantly, and I am done. I am now exploring other means to play (streaming and purchasing) the music I like using other apps.

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