Following, three months of silence about their update plans for the applications that bring the Xbox Music experience to Windows devices, Microsoft has now made updated versions of Xbox Music, Xbox Video, and Xbox Games on available to users.
As of yet, we’re unable to obtain any definitive list of improvements, however you don’t have to spend a large amount of time with the refreshed versions before running into new features.
This update to Xbox Music on Windows 8 brings with it support for filtering music downloaded from a user’s cloud collection, more opportunities to discover related albums and artist through out, and the ability to search your computer’s local collection. Hey, sometimes browsing to find that new Justin Timberlake album ruins the moment.
The newly updated Xbox Video app features the ability to download content that a user might previously purchased on in Zune Video Marketplace, the Xbox Video Store. More meta-data including actors, directors, and cast are now provided for both television shows and movies on that particular show’s store page. Rotten Tomatoes, and their reviews are now included on these individual store pages as well. Users can also rate video content themselves as well.
We should mention that both Xbox Music and Xbox Video now have the ability to control their own volume level separate of Windows’ system volume meter. We also noticed a few user experience improvements to help users better grasp what is being played from their local cache of media and what is being streamed.
Finally, Xbox Games now supports Xbox LIVE messaging! There’s also a new social buzz section that pulls in games reviews, but let’s be real here -they could have just thrown an updated app with only messaging and we’d all have celebrated.
We’re sure there’s more to be found here so we’ll keep looking. Each one of these application updates are available for free from the Windows Store immediately, so if you’re running Windows 8 we suggest you hit the ‘update’ button as soon as you can.
