Windows 10 (Home) PC user here, OS build 19045.3448. Today is October 6th, 2023, for future reference.
I recently discovered, via trying to play a downloaded folder of music and being surprised when the second song never played, that there’s something going on with my Groove Music app. Though it seems visually identical to how it was before, Groove Music now seems to be calling itself “Media Player”, not to be confused with Windows Media Player, which is still its own separate program. That’s mysterious, but not the main problem – up until recently, Groove would (correctly) interpret any sub-folder of the Music folder as a separate playlist and play through audio files automatically, like how you’d expect a playlist to act. It no longer does that and I have no idea why. In fact, I can’t even find a button within the “Media Player” interface itself to continue to the next song manually; I have to double-click each song individually (either in File Explorer or in “Media Player”‘s list view) to get it to play.
There’s also a Playlists folder within my Music folder now that I’m not sure I recognize, though it’s possible that it’s been there for a while and I just didn’t notice. It was empty to start with; I tried putting the folder of music I wanted to play as a playlist in there, but that didn’t change “Media Player”‘s behavior. With a little bit of cursory research, I discovered that Windows apparently keeps playlists as their own file type and that Groove Music stores them at C:Users[user]AppDataLocalPackagesMicrosoft.ZuneMusic_[xxxxxxxxxxxxx]LocalStatePlaylists, but that folder doesn’t appear to exist on my computer (found up to LocalState, but there’s no Playlists folder in it). The Windows support site still refers to Groove Music instead of “Media Player” and suggests changing a “Choose where we look for music on this PC” setting within an app simply called “Music,” neither of which appear to exist either.
“Media Player” does have functionality for creating playlists from scratch, so that’s at least a workaround to use if I have to, but I’d rather have my using-folders-as-playlists functionality back. Does anybody know what’s going on here? New software update (working as intended or not), some weird bug…?
