Xbox Music for Windows Phone 8.1 Gets Another Update

Keeping its promise to steadily iterate Xbox Music for Windows Phone 8.1 until it's really usable, Microsoft this weekend delivered another update to the app. Nothing major, again, and certainly not the much-needed performance improvements. But Xbox Music does pick up a handy music scrubber and a few other small changes.

The latest version of Xbox Music for Windows Phone 8.1, identified as version 2.5.3884.0, adds the following changes:

Music scrubber. If you're familiar with the scrubber in Xbox Video, it works like that, but it is harder to "grab". (Part of the problem is that it's on one page of a multi-page pivot, so if you miss it, you start scrolling to another page by mistake.) But the theory is the same: "Grab" the little dot and drag it left or right to scrub through the currently playing song.

Smoother Fast Forward and Rewind animations.

UI fixes to improve visibility of content.

Bug fixed where songs are incorrectly removed from playlists.

Fixes for unexpected app exits.

I'm not actually sure what a lot of that even means. (Fast Forward and Rewind animations?) But this is the first time I've seen this screen:

As always, more changes are on the way. Microsoft promises the following in future releases of the app:

Continued focus on stability and performance improvements.

- Initial sync of local and cloud content happens in the background.

- Usability improvements in Now Playing screen.

- Support for greater than 100 songs in Now Playing queue.

- Faster loading of long lists.

- Swipe gesture to advance songs on Now Playing screen.

- Transparent Tile support.

- Live Tile support.

- Design and layout changes to get you to your content faster.

- Kid's Corner support.

- General UX improvements.

Xbox Music comes with Windows Phone and should be updated automatically. If not, you can grab it from the Windows Phone Store.