Not every day I find myself agreeing with Ernst Křenek.
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Android Apple Music Beta Code Refers to Unreleased 'Apple Classical' App
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They should probably revamp the whole Apple Music experience. It's awful. It's slow, cluttered, not delightful to use. I ditched Spotify and I miss it terribly!
Apple's latest Apple Music beta app for Android may have revealed the name of the company's forthcoming app dedicated to classical music, suggesting a release might not be too far away.
Last year, Apple announced the purchase of classical music streaming service Primephonic, which features search and browse functionality specially optimized for classical music.
Apple said that the best elements of Primephonic would become a part of Apple Music, providing subscribers with an improved classical music experience.
The company also said it would also launch a new Apple Music app in 2022 dedicated to classical music, combining Primephonic's user interface and specializations for classical music with Apple Music and features such as Lossless and Spatial Audio.
The name of the forthcoming dedicated app was not mentioned at the time. However, lines of code discovered by 9to5Google in the Apple Music beta on Android suggest it could be called "Apple Classical," with the code string referring to the ability to open a compatible track directly in the optimized service.
Apple recently advertised a job for a UX Designer to work on the new standalone music app. According to the job description, the candidate would be expected to "provide UX expertise and new perspectives specifically for Primephonic" in order to help realize a distinct experience for classical music that would include "visual, audial, and haptic" aspects.
While the job listing suggested that the Primephonic brand will persist in some form as part of Apple's classical offering, it could well exist as a sub-section of the service under an umbrella name, and "Apple Classical" would seem to fit the bill.
Earlier this week, Apple made another music-related financial move by acquiring AI Music, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate personalized soundtracks and adaptive music.
Article Link: Android Apple Music Beta Code Refers to Unreleased 'Apple Classical' App
I literally listen to classical music eight hours a day in my office alone on a perfect day if there are no interruptions. Some music makes me pause and gaze at its beauty… some songs make me hit skip as fast as I possibly can. Some genres span decades while classical spans many centuries. We need a classical section worthy of the richness the genre offers. Can’t wait.
Speaks volume about your knowledge of classical music listeners in general. More than half of the concert-going crowd in my city are teenagers and people in their 20-30s.
Are you suggesting lossless and hifi are not its own little audio world with its own die-hard audience? Because I see a lot of HIFI stores all around selling a ton of premium audio gear to people who are clearly willing to pay for it.
I’m suggesting they’re not the kind of features you should sell as their own service, you make the profit on the hardware. Classical music requires no special hardware, so it’s the kind of thing that could better become a paid subscription.
It was widely reported that Spotify had plans to charge extra for exactly that (lossless) but then Apple gave it away for free and ruined Spotify's plans
Cool? No really sure how that supports your argument, since you point out that neither of them are selling higher-fidelity streaming as a paid feature. Regardless, you're really honing in on something that was only tangential to my original point.
We probably should all thank Spotify for its faltered plan. Apple was very reluctant to move to lossless and certainly didn't plan it when rolling out the $550 Airpod Max. Now not only Apple added lossless into its catalog, both Amazon and Tidal responded by adjust theirs too.
They don't even have the ability to create smart playlists in their android app. And smart playlists that reference other playlist can't transfer between devices. I'd love to get Apple Music if it worked but it's a total disaster. Even the Music app on Mac is horrible, and that's a big step down from iTunes versions that were already bad in a lot of ways.
I agree Apple Music app is crap when it comes to classical music, I just think they should fix the existing app instead of making a separate app for classical music.
Yeah I need to cancel Apple match … I’m just worried all my stuff will blow up hahaI forgot about iTunes Match. It costs something like $25/yr, or included with Apple Music. I was one of the people who kept paying for iTunes Match for a year, despite having Apple Music, thinking it was not included (in case there are any more of you out there).
Calling it Apple Match kind of sounds like a dating app.
Classical tends to be a dominant genre in HiFi circles, which makes sense when you realize that classical tends to be more technically demanding than pop or rock music (in terms of dynamic range, sound stage size and sound separation, compression quality, browsing and locating music). So it’s an important genre to target for, more than any other one genre (outside of maybe Jazz, but even it is lacking the sound stage size and browsing demands).
It’s more like being able to search by composer, conductor, soloist, and orchestra all at the same time, across material that may not be especially well tagged (some classical albums use the Artist tag for the orchestra, some for the composer, some for the soloist). Maybe the piece you found by searching for Mozart is an abridgment and you wanted to find the whole suite, or maybe you wanted just the classic motif from the best known movement and instead got the full suite. Or maybe the orchestra wasn’t the one you were looking for. Or the soloist. Or…If you can search for “Weeknd” in Apple Music, why can’t you search for “Mozart”?
Helps to play music, too. My appreciation of classical music comes in part from my days as a school orchestra member and the movements we played in school.
Probably also helps to experience a range of subgenres. Baroque may not be your thing but Romantic music might just be, or Shostakovich’s more jazz-influenced works might be what hooks you.
I appreciate the importance of nuances, I just find it would be more useful to improve the existing Apple Music search with your quoted refinements, rather than fragment the app. What will happen to all the classical music already in Apple Music and people’s playlists if Apple do release a new Classics app? ??♂️
I’d imagine that the playlists would just be shared between them. The classical app would likely just be a separate window into Apple Music, just with a better tagged database and a browser interface that focuses on just classical, or maybe that shows subgenres of classical as full blown genres in their own right.
I wouldn't mind a big improvement in Music, but it's been a constant -- when the app was good, classical on it sucked, and when the app was bad, classical on it sucked.
I'm not looking for a *better* experience in Apple Music services for classical. I'm looking for one that's actually worth using *at all*.
This is exactly the point. We need good, solid, consistent metadata, and the labels aren't up to it, and none of the streaming services are up to it. I've got literally hundreds of tracks of Shostakovich. Searching for "Shostakovich" simply isn't enough -- am I looking for symphonic works, chamber works, the quartets, one of his operas, one of his theater suites, one of his ballet suites, what?
If you read the press release from Apple when they bought Primephonic, it kept coming back to the fact that they were purchasing curated metadata. That's the key.
That’s only because you’ve been primed to associate Amazon’s brand with the word “Prime”!