From the Microsoft page, here's the changelog for version 3.6.1719.0:
- We made a significant improvement to the way we find your local music and sync your cloud music collection that makes this process much faster. This will cause a one-time rebuild of your collection when you first launch the app after this update.
- We also simplified our logic for hiding duplicates so managing your collection is easier. We’ll no longer match local MP3s to similar ones in OneDrive or your Music Pass collection.
- To make it more clear where your music is coming from, songs are now labeled as OneDrive, Purchased, Music Pass, or Local Only. We show you these in Select Mode (long-press, then Select) to catch you when you need them most.
- We also added the ability for you to see the full set of details on any track with long-press, then Properties.
- We brought back autosuggest when searching in the app and the ability to see everything you’ve searched for since you launched the app.
- We heard your feedback about the ability to see album art in Now Playing so we added a toggle in Now Playing to allow you to choose either album art or artist art.
- We added the ability to sort albums by release year.
- We made playlist editing easier - you can now select multiple items in a playlist and drag them to another spot in the playlist.
- We added better scaling so that images look better on larger devices.
- We added the explicit tag to the list of songs in Now Playing so that it’s easier to see when a song in your queue isn’t playable because it’s explicit.
- We also updated a few things so that the app works better on Continuum:
- Playback will continue even if the screen locks when using Continuum.
- We've continued to improve layouts of Groove at high resolution (ex: Explore Galleries & Search Results)
- We fixed a number of reliability issues – including the one that temporarily required us to disable ‘sticky pivots’. With this release we will once again remember what you were doing last and bring you back to the right place the next time you launch Groove.
Groove Music does indeed do a rebuild of your music library when you next start it after this update, but it should be better going forwards, as listed above.
Here's the new version in action:
In selection mode, the UI now clearly shows whether tracks are available offline or whether they're on OneDrive; (right) you can also sort music now by 'Release year', making sure that the very latest 'hip and happening tunes' are at the top. (You can tell that I'm not that hip and happening by my use of the phrase, can't you...?!)
For music that's playing, there's now the choice of going with Xbox Music, err... I mean Groove Music's own image record for that artist or using the embedded art in your tracks. A very welcome choice, which art to show is something that's entirely subjective!
Artwork is also better suited to large displays, here on the QHD-screened Lumia 950; (right) auto-suggesting matches to search queries, though the results aren't limited to just your library.
Long pressing a track now gives a context menu that includes 'Properties', though the dialog stops short at track sample rate, encoding and even file size. Come on Microsoft, let's have more gory details.