microsoft news

It looks like Amazon may soon release its official Amazon Music app for Windows 10 devices in Microsoft Store. The Amazon Music app was spotted in Microsoft Store today and as per the listing it will be available only for x86 PCs.The official Amazon Music app is now available for download from Microsoft Store in the US, UK, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. And this app can be downloaded only on x86 PCs for now.Using this app, you will be able to enjoy music from Amazon Music Unlimited, Prime Music, Amazon My Music and the music you have stored locally on your PC.Amazon Music Unlimited:Choose from tens of millions of songs, thousands of curated playlists and stations, and get...

It looks like Amazon may soon release its official Amazon Music app for Windows 10 devices in Microsoft Store. The Amazon Music app was spotted in Microsoft Store today and as per the listing it will be available only for x86 PCs. Using this app, you will be able to enjoy music from Amazon Music Unlimited, Prime Music, Amazon My Music and the music you have stored locally on your PC.Amazon Music Unlimited:Choose from tens of millions of songs, thousands of curated playlists and stations, and get personalized recommendationsStream weekly new releases from today’s most popular artistsExclusive Prime member pricingPrime Music:Enjoy a curated catalog of two million songs, playlists, and stations...

Google Drive yesterday aounced a new feature that will help enterprise organisations collaborate easily with others without worrying about file formats. For example, if you’re collaborating with an exteal agency, chances are you’re dealing with multiple file formats. They may be using Office 365 while you are using Google Suite. To use collaboration features like comments on documents, you need to convert the document to Google format. This new feature on Google Drive tries to solve this problem.You can now comment directly on more file types including Microsoft Office files, PDFs and images—without having to convert them into Google Docs, Sheets or Slides. In the Drive preview pane, you can...

Despite no longer being supported by a streaming music service or even allowing you to buy music, the Groove Music Player is still the native music playback app on Windows 10, and I suspect to the surprise of many Microsoft has continued to push out updates to the app.A new update has just arrived for Insiders on the Fast Ring which brings significant changes to the design of the app, in particular, the Playback bar.The Playback bar is now slightly translucent in line with Fluent Design, higher and the playback controls are now above the timeline, as can be seen in the screen shot above. The old design can be seen below:The update is rolling out now and will presumably come to regular Window...

Microsoft today released an update for Groove Music app in Microsoft Store for Insiders in the Fast Ring. This update brings the much-awaited Equalizer feature. Users can access the equalizer from the Settings page. Microsoft is offering several presets like Flat, Treble Boost, Bass Bost, etc for users to choose from. Users can also select their preferred sound levels using the Custom preset feature. Microsoft is also workng on visualizations for Groove app. Hopefully, they will release it soon for public testing. Download the updated app here from Microsoft Store. Thanks to Leo for the heads up. ...

I’ve been subscribing to Groove Music Pass since it was called Zune, and truth be told I would not mind continuing to pay if the service kept going, despite also subscribing to Spotify. However, with the above message greeting you when you run the app, there is not really any point, with no access to playing music you have not already purchased. It seems, however, Microsoft is quite happy to continue taking your money without providing any service, as they have continued to bill people for January 2018, despite not having a streaming service. Above is my records on account.microsoft.com and in a Reddit thread, a number of users are complaining about the same issue. Reportedly Microsoft Sto...

Satya Nadella’s Microsoft is not one to keep a failing product on life support, and after killing Windows Phone, the Microsoft Band and Groove Music, the axeman may have found another target. While Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant is present on nearly every Windows 10 PC in the west, it has never developed a massive following and has less than 1% of the 3rd party skills as market leader Amazon Alexa. The one saving grace of the digital assistant has been the promise of better integration with Microsoft’s enterprise backend, with Microsoft recent saying: We’re taking our Cortana integration to the next level by embedding sales activities, accounts, and opportunities into Cortana to sur...

Microsoft has finally disabled Groove Music’s streaming service, leading to the removal of music integration throughout Windows 10. Users will find that you can no longer use Groove Music in the Microsoft Store, and in Cortana’s Music integration functionality. Fortunately for users, Microsoft has replaced this lost integration with Spotify in some regards, and while you can’t use the Shazam-like music recognition service, you are still able to ask Cortana to look up artists and play music with Spotify. Here’s how to use Spotify with Cortana Open Cortana’s Notebook and navigate to the Music sub-menu For this step, you’ll need a Spotify Premium account. Then sign-in with your Spotify account...

The death of Groove Music has brought along an unexpected consequence – the music icon in the top right coer of your Cortana pop-up is now useless, as the music recognition service it is attached to has been retired. Jason Deakins, who works on Cortana team, confirmed as much, saying: Hi @faltermayer, that is correct: due to the shutdown of the Groove music service, Cortana's music recognition functionality has been retired. — Jason Deakins (@JasonDeakins) January 3, 2018 When you try and recognize a tune it gives you the rather creative error above. We assume at some point an update will remove the icon completely. The absenceof a Shazaam app on the Windows platform, unfortunately, ad...

With 2018 getting closer by the hour, we bid our final goodbyes to WhatsApp for Windows Phone 8 and Groove Music. As aounced by Microsoft a couple of months ago, today will be the last day for you to access Groove Music Pass. As for WhatsApp, the company aounced that it is ending support for older devices which included the good old Windows Phone 8 as well. As a goodbye let’s look back to how Microsoft ended up here. Back in 2006, Microsoft launched their first Mp3 Player called Zune which would go on to be one of the biggest flops for the company. Although it did paved way for what was about to come. Later on, Microsoft introduced Zune Music Pass which was similar to Apple Music or Google ...

Plex has introduced a new music app for Windows PCs. Inspired by the old Winamp, the app shows everything in a single window. Plex says that the app can support any music format imaginable. For those you don’t know, Plexis a client-server media player system and software suite comprising two main components. The Plex Media Server desktop application runs on Windows, macOS and Linux-compatibles including some types of NAS devices.Head below to check out the list of features shared by the team.Runs on macOS and Windows, and works like a native app (e.g. media keys for skipping tracks and toggling play/pause are supported, as are notifications).Direct plays just about any music format you could...

Apple has confirmed its speculated acquisition of the music streaming service, Shazam. The deal was first reported by Vox Media’s Recode, and will set the firm back $400 million. This acquisition will build up Apple’s music portfolio, which currently includes the long-ruing iTunes, Apple Music (which evolved from Beats Music when Apple aceponymouse eponymlus firm), and its headphone business. It is expected that the firm will make use of Shazam’s music recognition technology to further develop Siri and Apple Music.An Apple spokesperson told 9to5Mac today:We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked ...

Microsoft today aounced the release of the new Web Media Extensions package for Windows 10. This extension package adds support for the open source OGG container and the Theora and Vorbis codecs, and it also expands support for WebM VP9 to work with Theora in simple video elements. Since this package extends the base media platform in Windows, in addition to Microsoft Edge browser, even UWP apps can take advantage of this extended format support in Windows 10.Customers and developers who need support for these formats need to install this package manually from Microsoft Store. In the future, Microsoft may expand Web Media Extension package to all Windows 10 devices so that these formats be...

My Groove Music subscription ran out for the last time yesterday. As readers of this blog and tech news in general would know, Microsoft is shutting down the Groove Music service by the end of this month. The app for Windows 10 PCs and phones will remain, but it will be a shell of itself, offering only local music services and OneDrive Streaming. Come New Year’s day, Groove Music will be gone.Groove Music is, for those who are out of the loop, Microsoft’s music streaming service. The firm had maintained one ever since it debuted the Zune player in the late 2000s (and arguably, before then with MSN Music).The service was one of the first all-you-can-eat streaming services which popularised th...

The Beta version of popular YouTube app myTube has been updated to version3.2.10.0, with a number of fixes and improvements.The update allows users to enable or disable background playback, useful when using YouTube for streaming music only, and also set the default playback mode to audio only, which helps save data when using the service just for tunes.For those who use it to play back YouTube video on their Xbox, the default quality on the Xbox One is now 1080P, while 4K is selected for the Xbox One X.The update also has some usability improvements, including having the quality/options menu in the playback controls remain on when pointer movement is detected, and also improvements in this...

We reported last month that Microsoft was working on native support for the freeVorbis, Theora and Ogg media formats on Windows 10, and today we are happy to report that the codecs can now be downloaded from the Windows Store.Contained in an app calledWeb Media Extensions, Microsoft writes:The Web Media Extensions package extends Microsoft Edge and Windows 10 to support open source formats commonly encountered on the web. By installing this Media Extension package, users will be able to natively play content delivered in the OGG container or encoded using the Vorbis or Theora codecs. Once installed, this extension is automatically used by both web sites and apps with no user action require...

Microsoft is adding support for three new media formats to Windows 10 in the future. Windows 10 already supports a very wide range of media formats, both through native support and third-party apps. Most notably, Redmond added support for the Free Lossless Audio Codec on Windows with the launch of Windows 10 a few years ago.And now, it’s adding support for the OGG media container, Vorbis audio cod...

Though last year’s Forza Horizon 3 supported streaming music files through Microsoft’s OneDrive, it looks like this feature hasn’t made it to Forza Motorsport 7 as of yet. A spokesperson for developer Tu 10 Studios recently spoke with Windows Central and stated that players will need to wait a bit until they can personalize their playlists.“Forza Motorsport 7 will let players use their personal ...

Microsoft has released a new update for the Groove Music app for Android, taking it to version11.0925.1507.The update brings along two new features which are both rather basic and which we are surprised were not there already.The first is the ability to move to the next track by swiping the now playing screen. We can also confirm swiping in the opposite direction also brings you to the previous ...

Update:Microsoft has reached out to us, clarifying thatOneDrive on iOS will automatically convert HEIC files to JPEG when you back them up on your iPhone, so you will still be able to view them as regular image files in your Windows 10 device and iPhone. But if you want to keep the original file format and save some storage space, thus opting for HEIC, you won’t be able to view them on your Wind...