Today sees an update to the official (Xbox) Music application in Windows Phone, delivered via the Store. The chief improvements are the ability to force a 'sync' (with music on OneDrive), along with faster indexing in the phone client, and to prune items from your 'Recent' played tracks.

Small but significant, here's the official changelog:

• You can now remove an item from your Recent plays!
• Tired of waiting for the app to sync? Now you can manually kick one off whenever you like from Settings.

The sync referred to is that with OneDrive, using the full online streaming playback introduced some time ago, but there do seem to be improvements to local indexing of music tracks downloaded to the device, in my testing. Some screens of the new features:

Long pressing on an item in 'Recent Plays' now offers a 'remove' option. Just in case you wanted to keep this list lean and mean? (right) The 'Sync now' option is for tracking changes in what you have stored in the cloud, but the local indexing of music on your phone does seem to benefit too.... Or am I succumbing to 'seems faster' syndrome after an update?(!)

Music is still missing niceties like gapless playback, but it's certainly 'getting there', I'd argue, and I have no serious complaints. Comments?