This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.
But I wonder if it will help with finding which version of a work to listen to. A given symphony or piano prelude might have 100 or more recordings. If you go to classical music forum postings, you can usually find a thread asking "what's your favorite performance of..." and quickly find that there are 1 or 2 or 3 versions widely considered the best.
I really want a crowdsourced version of this -- both the most-listened and highest-rated recordings of a given work by a given composer. Because it's a lot of research to do otherwise.
And some people might think it can't matter that much, how different could they really be? But it's astonishing. The same work in the hands of one conductor+orchestra plods along dead and disjointed and you never want to hear it again, while another one soars full of life, the work makes sense and it becomes your favorite.
This is 100% accurate. Classical music is just different from other music in too many ways to make them work well in the same UI. I have yet to see a UI that does it well, so I'm looking forward to seeing Apple's stab at it.
Generally you can't go wrong with Deutsche Grammophon, or Hyperion, or even Telarc, but there sure are some stinkers out there, labels just trying to have a large catalog of any quality. And sometimes even a popular recording just doesn't work for me as well as a lesser-known recording, because personal taste can be strange.
I am not into classical music, but I think there are similarities for fans of jam bands especially the grateful dead. Ive never heard a group so passionate about specific versions of song depending on the date/location.
I feel UI designers could make something work but its such a niche group of people its hard to spend resources designing and maintaining a catalog of recordings of different versions of the same song.
Come to think of it, Phish or Grateful Dead live shows have some overlap, but that's more about recordings on different dates by the same artist, while classical adds different artists, or sometimes the same artist on different dates, or sometimes the same orchestra but a different conductor, or...
But yes, that's the closest I can think of, but I think it's a smaller niche even than classical music.
Hey, thanks for the recommendation! This looks great.
I can endorse the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, which is a very well made app and also streams in 4k/lossless/atmos too - Berlin Phil performances only, though. It's essentially a remote seasonal membership to the symphony. It looks like Stage+ has a wider range of performances, which is appealing, although it's very fun to watch evening concerts live from Germany almost any day of the week at 11am Pacific.
I've noticed there's a problem on streaming services where low quality artists basically spam the service with extremely low quality recordings of classical pieces. They often sound like they just got a midi file of the score and played it back through a piece of software. The scores for most classical music are public domain so there is nothing "wrong" about this but no one really wants to listen to low quality MIDI playback versus a human performance.
When you search for a given piece of classical music you have to wade through all this low quality stuff.
It would be great if Apple Music finds a way to combat that. I recently switched from Amazon to Apple, Apple generally seems to have better control of the catalog so maybe it's less of a problem there.
Apple Music actually has a lot of human editors and curators controlling playlists and spotlighting featured music. I'm sure their classical service will be similar.
That is true, but given that classical music probably has a much smaller audience to offset the cost of curation by humans, I wonder how the service will be profitable for Apple.
My guess (which could be wildly off base) is that classical music is probably producing material in a much slower pace than pop music, so if the current catalog is curated once, updates will be incremental. So, given enough time, the service will eventually be profitable. And Apple can take on the task because they have deep enough pockets to not worry about recouping the cost of initial curation ASAP.
> They often sound like they just got a midi file of the score and played it back through a piece of software.
I'd say it's more than likely they did play the piece themselves, just it's often done by individual piano players that don't really know how to record piano digitally effectively. They're pianists, not sound engineers, after all. Often you'll find recordings of the default piano patch built into their digital pianos, or you'll see them using low quality VSTs or good ones that they simply don't know how to get the best results out of.
Hell, even if they're recording a real piano, they often don't have the best spaces, the best equipment, or even really know what they're doing. There's a lot of bad recordings done in good spaces as well.
A sort of glimpse into recording piano from a wonderful pianist, Nahre Sol, can be found on her youtube channel [1]. It's really hard to get right, even if you're an excellent pianist because ultimately, recording engineering is an entirely different field of expertise.
As far as filtering out the low quality stuff... is there even a reasonable way to do that? It seems wholly subjective. You could probably create a filter for recording labels that are known to put out good classical music recordings like Deutsche Grammophon and the like if you only want professionally recorded music.
I once asked Android Auto to play "act 2 from carmen" and it responded with an absolutely bizarre rendition of the Toreador Song that had been programmed into a MIDI in the voice of birds chirping. Just crazy. Sometimes I think the algorithm they use at YouTube Music optimizes for paying the least royalties.
> This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.
So this is true for how people organize popular music, but I can't help but think the classical music model is better and even pop music fans might benefit from having an information model for their music that is more in line with how classical music is organized.
Pop music seems to short-shrift the songwriters and other people who work in the background (at least when it comes to credit, if not always money). And some live-music focused acts, like jam bands, would probably seriously benefit from tracking performances in the same way. I know Phish fans, for example, usually end up tracking their favorite recordings, performances, and dates by filename in similar ways to classical music fans. And the models used by standard music and streaming applications don't fit them very well either.
I like the idea of some sort of curation process but I’m much less interested in an algorithmic ranking and much more interested in _why_ a particular recording is favoured so that I can see whether it lines up with what I understand about the work.
The example I raise is the hundreds of recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin. An algorithmic ranking would likely put Hilary Hahn’s recordings near the top. But I find her approach very “direct”, metrical, and “in the string.” Christian Tetzlaff has a more “Baroque” reading. As a listener, I would want to know that. But this is probably too much to ask. I was happy enough when Apple started recognizing multi-movement works. Now if they stop calling everything a “song” I’ll be ecstatic.
Same could be said for compositions recorded on different instruments. Moonlight Sonata doesn't have to be played on piano. There are lots of recordings of it on other instruments.
Another example is orchestras that record historical pieces with period correct instruments that are intonated/tuned/tempered in a period correct way as those changed over the years.
Look up Well Temperament versus Equal Temperament, etc..
These kinds of changes can make things sound quite different than a modern interpretation on modern instruments setup in a modern way.
Goldberg variations comes to mind. If you search for it on your music service you will without a doubt be presented with Glenn Gould famous interpretation from 1955 where he eccentrically hums you through. You can then listen other renditions and you will notice they are quite different (foreinstance Fazil Say or Lang Lang)
There are truly so many variables, How many of each instrument in an orchestra, the orchestra's layout, the conductor, the recording, the acoustics of the physical location, etc...
My favorite example of this is the Glenn Gould recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations. He has 2 famous recordings - one recorded in 1955, another in 1981. They are very different in tone.
I'm looking forward to this app in part because I think I can finally let go of keeping the Plex Player app on my phone almost exclusively for listening to the Glenn Gould SACD collection I ripped like a decade ago. Great recommendation, and I'm genuinely happy at the thought that this release could expose a lot more people to his work.
If it's like PrimePhonic, the classical streaming service Apple bought and converted into this, it has educational content that guides you towards some of the best recordings. The main interface is more about discovering and searching for certain recordings yourself, though.
> This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.
It really doesn't. It was easy enough to organize music by the correct metadata in a local collection on Amarok 15 years ago. ID3 already supports all of the requisite metadata. You just need an app that is flexible and supports a 'now playing queue' by default and offers multiple views into your collection instead of the watered down garbage you get with streaming music apps today.
The only reason you'd think this is because most streaming apps today have a UI that is an even worse iteration of a very old version of iTunes, where you have to manually create a playlist in a cumbersome fashion in order to have any real control over what you're playing.
It's not just about organizing, though -- it's about social discovery.
It's about having a "current top composers" next to "current top artists".
It's about "current top songs" not having all 4 movements of a single work listed as separate songs. It's about the radio feature not randomly dropping you into the 17th track of an opera (with exceptions for certain arias).
It's about "people who listen to this composer also listen to..." along side "people who listen to this artist also listen to...".
But even organization was never fully solved in ID3, because it doesn't support multiple artists on a track (or multiple composers) in any standardized way. It's already a problem in popular music, but even worse in classical when both a conductor and a soloist and an orchestra are performing. ID3 doesn't have any way to group movements of a work together either -- you have to smush work and movement together in the title field.
>> It really doesn't... You just need an app that is flexible
Do you have a suggestion about an app that doesn't suck for classical music? I'm aware that metadata fields exist, but that doesn't help with playback, which is why the original comment mentioned a dedicated interface.
Nice, but it would be great if Apple fixed the UI and bugs in Apple Music first.
I can't hide the non-streaming parts I'll never use, but sometimes search keeps directing me to it.
And that's when searching itself isn't wildly broken. A quarter of the time, the search bar loses focus after each character, requiring me to click back in or reboot the app.
But the key real estate at the bottom of the screen is not used well under that circumstance—I’d really like to have more useful options there than Library - Radio - Search
Yeah, nice, but I will still use YouTube and Reddit for classical music. I can get access to lesser known composers and artists on YouTube, and Reddit will surface better suggestions and commentary. Even the YT comments are good quality in classical music videos.
I'm still surprised that there isn't a requirement for streaming services to carry publicly beneficial content (and pay a license fee for such content to NPR/PBS).
The Republicans in congress hate NPR/PBS and have done everything they can to cut off any source of funding to it. Newt Gingrich famously wanted to zero out public broadcasting funds in the 90s.
One very good streaming service for classical music is idagio.com
I can only hope that they won't offer auto generated playlists the way Spotify does. No matter what you listen to - Stravinsky, Stockhausen, 12 tone music, baroque, opera - it immediately starts playing the same 3 or 4 pieces by Vivaldi, Satie, Chopin right after the album is finished
There was a period where classical music on Spotify was really good. The search results were clearly curated by someone - search for Bach, and artists like Gould and Gardiner would come first; Abbado and Bernstein for Mahler, and so on. Now it's much more random - search for Beethoven and you get a lot of "Beethoven for Relaxation" and a lot of recordings that would be no one's first choice - while something as essential as Karajan's recording of the 9 symphonies is pushed waaaay down in the results
KDFC is a great -- maybe the best -- resource to just listen and not have to think about what you want to listen to. Apple Classical will the go-to for when you're looking for something in particular, even if it's something vague. If I'm in the mood for Bach, I'll go Apple Classical. If I'm doing dishes and just want to hear something, I'll put on KDFC.
What would kill KDFC would be Apple putting up a really good streaming station for classical.
Older recordings are simply not going to have higher quality available and it wouldn't really be beneficial to stream it at a higher rate just for the sake of hitting a marketing number.
In many cases I'd agree, but in this case I think it's perfectly fine (and there's no other way) since Apple is just a distributor for other people's recordings.
I think it's pretty clear Apple is making "192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless" distribution and listening available, but obviously it's up to labels and artists to supply actual recordings at that level. And many can't, simply because it wasn't mastered at that level, or wasn't even recorded at it.
Great, because we need more specialized apps. I love classical music but I would rather use Spotify for that purpose because at this point I have realized the only thing important for Apple is money. I prefer not to further contribute to a trillion dollar company that has so much restrictions in their ecosystem.
Sure, spotify doesn't care that much about money. Must be why they are on the stingy side of compensating artists compared to Apple and just about every other streaming service.
spotify is ripping their app apart to try and make money off of podcasts, audio books and video. it's become an app that 'also plays music' at this point vs a music streaming app.
But I wonder if it will help with finding which version of a work to listen to. A given symphony or piano prelude might have 100 or more recordings. If you go to classical music forum postings, you can usually find a thread asking "what's your favorite performance of..." and quickly find that there are 1 or 2 or 3 versions widely considered the best.
I really want a crowdsourced version of this -- both the most-listened and highest-rated recordings of a given work by a given composer. Because it's a lot of research to do otherwise.
And some people might think it can't matter that much, how different could they really be? But it's astonishing. The same work in the hands of one conductor+orchestra plods along dead and disjointed and you never want to hear it again, while another one soars full of life, the work makes sense and it becomes your favorite.