Groove for Windows 10 is Being Updated with Better Playlists and Metadata Editing

Microsoft continues to update Groove across various platforms. Today, those on the Windows Insider program can preview a coming update that improves Your Groove playlists and provides a way to once again edit song metadata.

Note: This update is available to Insiders with Windows 10 for PCsand Windows 10 Mobile.

Today’s update has two major new features. (Explore debuted earlier.)

First, responding to complaints from users—and this is feedback I’ve received as well—Groove now provides a way to rate Your Groove playlists and to mute individual songs. Microsoft says examine the these changes users make and improve the Your Groove playlists over time.

To see what that looks like, I started a Your Groove playlist—“Confident Mainstream Rock in the 1980s,” kind of typical of the often-terribly-named Your Groove playlists we see today. The rating is simple enough: There’s a “Like this playlist?” toggle with thumbs up and thumbs down choices.

To mute a song in a Your Groove playlist, just select it and then choose the new “Mute this song” button that appears in the pop-up toolbar.

The second big feature is the ability to edit song metadata like album info, artist name, and so on. This was a feature back in the Zune days, so it’s nice to see it making a comeback. That said, those who stick exclusively with Music Pass-based music probably won’t have much use it: This is for the fogies that still cart around local music collections.

To edit the metadata for a song, select it in Groove and choose Edit Info from the toolbar. (Or, right-click and choose Edit Info from the pop-up menu.) A Edit Song Info window appears, with editable text fields for Song title, Song artist, Track (number), Album title, Album artist, Disc (number), Genre, and Year.

The “Show advanced options” switch reveals just one more metadata item, Song sort title.

To test this feature, I had to copy some music to my PC: You can’t edit Music Pass-based music, which makes sense. But you also can’t edit music you’ve copied to OneDrive.