Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsIntuitive and easy to use -- but I am dinging it because of some of the problems with the music app...
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2016
I don't normally do reviews, but I figure we spend so much here on Amazon (especially on music) that it would be worthy of my time to do so. We ended up swapping out the Fire TV box for the Roku 3 because of some of the awful feedback we got (very loud static sound) when we left the Netflix app (we were afraid of blowing out our speaker) but we did truly miss some of the features that the Amazon Fire TV offered that we could not get on the Roku primarily having ready access to our pictures and videos -- both of which we upload to the Amazon cloud and the music. We are Prime members, we buy 99.99% of our music through Amazon, we are on the trial of Music Unlimited and also take advantage of the Prime Music so having access to this is nice, we upload all of our photos and videos to the cloud... yeah, we are pretty deeply entrenched in all things Amazon...
Things that I like:
Easy access to Prime TV and Movies and movies that we have purchased through Amazon
Easy access to Netflix (very happy to not have the static feedback!!)
Access to all of our photos and videos through the Amazon Cloud -- it is fun to sit and scroll through all of our pictures and watch videos that we have added/uploaded
MUSIC! We can now access any and all music that we have through Amazon, including the Music Unlimited and the Prime Music
Highly intuitive and easy to set up -- just plug it into an available HDMI port, plug it in and let technology do it's magic!
The remote is small and easy to use (I get a small kick out of the Alexa feature and like to use that when I can)
Things that I dislike:
When I first unpacked the Fire TV Stick, it was running an old version of the music app. That was the first feature I wanted to play around with. It has no problem recognizing our uploaded music or any Prime music, but anytime I tried to play something that we added from the Music Unlimited I was getting a 'song unavailable' error message. I spent the better part of 3 hours of my life on hold with Amazon on their online chat. I was transferred several times and never got any resolve. I deauthorized, reauthorized, restarted, cleared the cache, stopped the music app to no avail. I was finally told that they would start a ticket to investigate -- now 2 days later I have yet to hear anything which is okay, when I woke up the next day the app was different and I was able to play the music just fine... I still have yet to hear anything back from Amazon...
Music is number one for us. We listen to a LOT of music. Music is probably 90% of my day. I am happy that my music app is now up to date but I am VERY disappointed that getting to our own music is such a chore. Where did the alphabet search go? Say for instance I want to listen to The Pixies, no longer is the ability to select 'P' available -- nope, I have to scroll through ALL of my music (and there is a LOT of it) or go to the 'search' feature on the main music screen. The Alexa feature does not work for this. If I say "The Pixies" it pulls up options for Movies & TV but nothing for music. I have to the main music screen, go up to the search feature and type my life away. It is a small thing, but a thing none the less. I will say this, once I do the search the features are great -- it pulls up things that are available on Prime, Songs in Amazon Music, Artists in My Music, Songs in My Music -- this is a nice feature. This is also true for playlists, albums and songs -- if I want to listen to a certain playlist I have to scroll through them all . Long story short, PLEASE BRING BACK THE ALPHABET FEATURE -- it really makes it so much easier to navigate and it isn't such a chore to have to sit and input everything manually. Not that my life is THAT fast paced that I can't sit and type, but it was a nice improvement to the Fire TV Box when Amazon made that available.
There are times I scroll through things when I am listening to music. I will add things to our Watchlist or see what is available and maybe even purchase a movie. There used to be a handy feature with the Menu button that would instantly bring me back to the 'now playing' for my music. That feature is gone. If I am on the main home page and I press the Menu Button I get... NADA. If I want to go to my 'now playing' I have to go to the music app first. Again, it is a small thing, but it was a nice feature that was available on the Fire TV Box.
It doesn't always go to the screen saver. We don't like a static picture on our TVand have the screen saver feature set to 5 minutes but for some reason, it doesn't always seem to go to it. For instance, I just got home from dropping my son off to school (we were gone for about 20 minutes and I came home it yep, no screensaver it still had the Home Screen vividly displayed.
The music app is now at the very bottom of the list -- below even the settings. A small thing, but an irritation none the less.
When I go to a playlist and select a song, it seems to arbitrarily select something within the list. It is a small thing, but it still kind of sucks. When I select a song, I want to play THAT song, not a song the Fire TV wants me to listen to. It is a quirky thing that we've dealt with as long as we've been using the Fire TV but since I am reviewing it, I'll add it as a minor irritation.
Overall, I do think I would recommend this to someone who is in deep with Amazon like we are. I would improve this rating to a 4 (maybe even a 5) star if you would improve some of the funky things with the music, the menu button and the screensaver. Again, music is such a big deal for us so that is why the lower rating. If you are using this more for apps like Netflix, the photos or the Prime movies and TV it is pretty flawless.
