Top Request: Navigate music collections by folder in the Groove app

I've been reading some other posts on here. Tags would be great, that way you can mix in Groove Music Pass songs as well as what is on my computer. But what you would need to be able to do is select multiple to filter on.

At current, at least on my phone, you can only select one genre at a time. But what if I want to listen to Game music and classical at the same time? So maybe the folder thing is more about introducing a greater ability to filter your music on certain things. But they can't just be the normal Artist or Genre tags either, have to have the ability to add custom tags to it.

After talking to a few Twitter users as well, the other thing that came up was that what would be really handy would be a way to limit the sources of the music by toggling the sources of the music on and off. So I can open up a list of my known folder structure, un-tick the the Christmas sub folder and then when I hit shuffle music, it no longer will play Jingle Bells in the middle of August...

And I would love Groove for ever if you could add in rules to the tags or sources filters that will automatically add or remove the music from the collection. So if I take that Christmas tag or folder and set a rule that says it's only in the music collection during December!

And on a side note about filtering sources, it would be great if my phone had an option to automatically shuffle in music from the cloud sources when connected to a non-metered internet connection and then when I go back to 4g, it blocks all those songs and just gives me the local content only.

Files and folders are a necessary evil for working on metadata, but that's all. I certainly don't use them to browse my music collection. I use Windows Explorer to browse folders.

How do you find a specific song more efficiently that way? When I'm listening to music, I think of specific songs I'd like to hear and add them to the current playlist. Not sure how tags help with this usage.

The actual folder structure should be "Artist" then a subfolder for "Album". I think tags should then be used to create "virtual folders" to be viewed within Groove. For instance, Groove should automatically tag each song with artist, album, genre, and holiday music. Holiday music automatically applied if "Christmas", "Chanukah", "Kwanza" is in the album or song title. This holiday tag would stop my main frustration of holiday music getting pulled into "My Groove" or my random automatic mixes in any month other than December. Allow users to apply their own tags as well and have the ability to filter by one or more tags to create unlimited "virtual folders" based on selected tags. Songs could appear in multiple "virtual folders" even though they are only stored in one actual file. Then allow users to play, random, add to, based on the virtual folder. I never use Explorer to find anything other than pictures of documents. I will never use Explorer to navigate my music as "Groove" already does a nice "folder-like" handling of artist and album views. Add tags and allow virtual folders based on them.

Like others have mentioned, in addition to above, please offer a Groove Family Plan, ability to edit song info and album artwork, lossless formats and maybe even a "jukebox" mode that would allow users and party guests to cue songs up. Thanks for all your work on this and for gradually getting Groove to where Zune used to be and even better.

Files and folders are a necessary evil for working on metadata, but that's all. I certainly don't use them to browse my music collection. I use Windows Explorer to browse folders.

It seems to me that there are plenty of other things missing in Groove that should be fixed first.

For example, "Cast to" networked audio devices via DLNA. It's been over a year since a Microsoft spokesperson said:

Eventually the new music app should have support for casting to such devices, the video preview app should already have this support enabled.

...and we are still waiting.

It's a sad sign of the times that the venerable Windows Media Player still has more functionality and capability than Groove.

Personally, I've given up on Groove. I use Roon. It's not free, in fact it's probably expensive in most people's eyes, but it does a far better job than Groove is ever likely to do of handling my music collection (supporting, amongst other things, albums, artists, composers, genres, year released, works and performances) and streaming to multi-room audiophile-level systems.