[missionsparta]

For those like me that have had nothing but trouble with Xbox Music and Xbox Video and haven't seen these alternatives....here you go.

If your music library is being made a mess out of with Xbox Music, try MUSIC INFO. Great product and the dev completely supports it and updates it.

If your video library is being made a mess out of with Xbox Video, try EXPLAY. Another fantastic video app that actually organizes your videos (TV and Movie). There are some bugs, but the developer says he is aware of them and an update fixing these problems and adding many new features is due out mid January. For those having trouble with getting the program to organize correctly, make sure that you have a TV and Movie folder. Make sure from there each TV show has its own folder and each season its own. I use the format S01E01 plus the episode title in the file names and it does a good job of figuring out which episode is which. With the movies, also make sure each individual movie also gets its own folder.

These developers seem to have put in way more time than Microsoft did with their library media managers and also seem to have a lot better clue as to what many of us are looking for. Please at least look at these so people actually putting the time into Windows RT are given a chance. Id hate to see either of these programs dropped. They are both front and center on my Surface.

[magictriangle]

I just tried this out for the first time a couple days ago. I like it much better than xbox music for many reasons. My only problem is that it stops playing music once the Surface goes idle. This may or may not be due to the fact that my music is playing from the micro SD card, but I haven't had this same problem with the native music app.

[missionsparta]

Latest update fixed this issue.

[msdugn]

For those like me that have had nothing but trouble with Xbox Music and Xbox Video and haven't seen these alternatives....here you go.

If your music library is being made a mess out of with Xbox Music, try MUSIC INFO. Great product and the dev completely supports it and updates it.

If your video library is being made a mess out of with Xbox Video, try EXPLAY.

Thanks for the recommendations. I just tried MUSIC INFO and love it. It's smart enough to scan outside of the libraries alone and grab all of my music from the SD card. Even though I used all of the hacks to get my SD content into the libraries, it just doesn't always work. The formatting and flow for viewing and playing music from my collection is fantastic. I'll definitely give the developer some great accolades and a great 5-star rating.

I didn't try EXPLAY, but I already use MOBILE.HD - not so much for organization, but for flawlessly playing MKV files locally or streaming voer my home network. For MKVs and streaming, I jsut haven't found anything better.

Thx for the head's up!

[DougB541#CB]

I'm at work away from my Surface right now, but does Music Info play music from your SD card without hacking away?

Also...does it support push to an xbox?

[VidJuhEffex]

I use both, as xbox music was clearly designed with streaming and subscription im mind, it rarely if ever gives me problems when I'm using smartDJ or playing stuff off their network. Music Info, unfortunately, won't even play downloaded xbox music due to the DRM.

[Quin452]

I use SmartGlass to play albums to my Xbox, otherwise I use my Xbox to stream.
I'll give these a go, considering I don't want to use Zune (ugly to look at) :-)

[theefman]

Tried a lot of music apps, seems not one is able to do a task as simple as reading WMP or Zune playlists and confine you to their own proprietary playlist format so my playlists that are stored on my server so I can get them from any device eg my Xbox are useless with these apps.

[Mark Wedge]

I'm at work away from my Surface right now, but does Music Info play music from your SD card without hacking away?

I have been unable to get it to. When it tries to scan outside the libraries, it just exits and restarts.

[missionsparta]

The developer is amazing and has answered every email/question I have asked. Shoot him an email. He listens to almost every suggestion, it seems like.