Great to have a Microsoft employee on these boards who feels our pain. I must be a masochistic to still be here but what do you do, Apple is greedy, Google is evil, while MS is just stupid :-S. MS kills all the things that are innovative and differentiates them such as 'Media Center', 'Home Server', 'Zune', and its a wonder that they actually have stuck through with Xbox or Windows phone or that I still use any of them. I pretty much would rather listen to Pandora, Iheart Radio,, or Nokia Mix, than deal with the static break in my own songs, or the frustration of playlists, and that's not even going there about duplicate songs, screwing my song info up, and the constant issue of song rights.
I have tried very hard to like these changes but the Windows 8 Xbox music sucks and the Music app, hub just plain sucks. It's a phone but for many like me it replaces their mp3 player and is a consumption device and for me at this point to still wish I used my Zune player, or even a ITouch is simply ridiculous. The old Music Hub sucked, the new Music app sucks, and for some reason MS just doesn't think its odd or unacceptable that they amputated their media capabilities and in its place provide 2 years of alpha frustration crapola. If only it was as easy to bring back Zune.
(If you need help finding my other comment thread about it being slower do a word search for "Can't they make the new app part of the OS like the old one".) If you want to express your feelings you can always reply to that comment with something like "OMG you're so right it will be slower!!!", but leave the comment threads of people who are complaining about a small display bug alone, it's not related.
If you scroll up a little you'll find a long comment that I posted earlier today where I'm complaining about that. Now if you want to complain about the fact that it will be slower now that it's not native, complain somewhere else. Get over it, it's a beta app, that's all I'm saying. So when someone says Microsoft is the devil because there is a bug in their beta app, well.
A software is a terribly complicated thing to write, and it can't be done in a night, and a lot of people here don't seem to understand that. It will never be as fast as it was, but it won't be a crap as it currently is, and I'm sorry but I have no respect for people who can't see that. I'm not defending it as if it was better, I'm just defending it againts stupid people who don't want to admit that it's still beta and that it will get faster and better and that bugs will be removed. If you read all my comments on this page you'll see that I'm also complaining that it will never be faster than a native app. Why should I waste bandwidth streaming from the cloud when I have my music stored on a DLNA NAS attached to my network? If I have a hub, why do I need an over crowded ap list? But more importantly, and specific to this conversation is that the Music Hub still does not support DNLA on my local network. The game hub is still there, showing all my games installed, but adding my games into my installed ap list is just stupid. I don't need it grouped by date a picture was taken.
And like I already said, the Photo Hub now makes it difficult to find a picture I took. Why have it when I have to have 4 other aps to do what the previous one ap could do? It was great. But I don't like how the people hub needs another ap to do even the most basic function.
I'm not happy with how the People Hub now works, but if decoupling that from the base code allows for quicker updates to support new providers or services from exisiting providers then I'm ok with it. WP8 has only been out since November 2012, and we already got 2 GDR's prior to 8.1 and now 8.1 (which is a major update).
And Microsoft has now increased the speed at which they update the various platforms. No I do get it, but a well thought, well designed app doesn't need to be updated that often, particularly with something as basic as music, photos, and video playback and management.