Yeah, I don’t know about the Apple Music service. I once trialled it and it did override my own categories and classifications. I only know about the Apple Music app.
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Apple Continuing Work on New Apple Music App for Classical Music
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Composers, mainly. Like, looking up specific composer's works as played by OTHER composers. Try searching for a specific Beethoven symphony and you might get different results than you might be looking for. In this app there's a ton of options for nearly anything you can think to look for.
Or, the app has options to browse by time period, too, like the Renaissance or Baroque periods.There's also built in radio stations and new releases specifically tailored for Classical Music.
I'm actually happy with the Apple Music app as is, if I'm either (a) at home or (b) using it on an iPod touch with a copy of my collection. That's after learning what metadata it lets you edit and what it means for the application.
When the Home Pod Pineapple-Shape came out, I nabbed a couple and can now stream lossless rips to them losslessly. I've got a headless music server (a 2011 Mac mini!) I can direct using Apple's Remote app. That gives me an alphabetical list of composers, and if I choose one, I get an alphabetical list of works. I don't use a search function, I just browse.
That's the kind of experience I'd like to be able to replicate, or at least get close to, in a streaming service.
All of this, of course.
The principle trouble with Classical is inconsistent metadata from the record labels. This goes back to the CD era - pulling track info metadata from CDs and porting it to digital download is a classic example of garbage in garbage out. When I copied my CDs into iTunes (metadata provided by the data encoded on the CD) it was clear that the CD producers often dropped the ball, encoding inconsistent metadata into the digital master from one track to the next. Even a simple misspelling on one track could break the integrity of a four-movement work.
Of course, I can't blame CDs entirely for the mess. After all, many CD releases were re-releases of black vinyl, 78s, and even some Edison cylinders, and back before Edison, when sheet music sales were everything... still plenty of inconsistency on every step of the journey.
Should it be Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67? Symphony #5? Beethoven's Op. 67 symphony in C mol, "The Fifth?" Beethoven's Symphony in C minor? Etc., etc.
There are further issues, of course. Record labels in various regions of the world using different terminology/naming conventions; the inconsistent use of popular/colloquial names for works; the failure to include composer catalog numbering (Köchel, BWV, etc.).... There are many database fields that can be filled. Without proper input validation and standardization, it's a total mess, and proper database normalization (and search indexing) is a huge task.
Then there's the third-party service Apple uses for metadata/album art. Plenty of room for further compounding of the errors/inconsistencies of the record industry.
That's a substantial part of the job undertaken by Primephonic - wrangling a huge catalog of recorded music into a database that serves-up accurate query results while respecting the specific needs of classical listeners (whole-composition playback, etc.). Clearly, from Apple's standpoint buying Primephonic was more efficient than fixing what it already has.
I hope that Apple does not operate separate Music apps by genre. No genre should be excluded from the larger whole that is music. I have eclectic tastes, I want to access them all in one place.
Adding some more specialized fields would actually be useful for pop songs as well. Might help parse or deduplicate the dreaded “Song Title (feat. Other Artist) Third Artist Remix” by “Primary Artist” from album “Album Title (Special Fancy Deluxe Edition) with message from Artist” from (year that’s different from original release year) (Explicit Version), which is technically a cover of something else called “Song Title”, and will inevitably appear in your library as six different versions…
The only way I've found to make classical work in the Apple ecosphere is to edit edit edit edit. A lot of work, but worth it.
This is one of the places where the "track"/"artist"/"album" model failed classical worst. I've got five different CDs of Shostakovich's 15th Symphony, and no two of them pair it with the same work. The ephemera that it appeared with this or that on this or that CD is just not worth noting somewhere as important as the front-row "album" tag. It would be like having a wikipedia entry about someone that spends a third of its space talking about some other guy who was the subject's next door neighbor for a few months in 1993.
That's the whole ball game. No app can make up for consistently bad data. It's like Apple Maps -- no matter how pretty it is, its value all comes down to the accuracy of the data.
Ideally, one place would be the best. But so far it has always come with serious compromises for classical -- serious enough that I am prepared to use a different app in order to get it right.
OMG, I hate this so much, too! Is it "Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher," or "(Your Love) Keeps lifting me Higher" or what? Plus artists! I could have the same song by "Diana Ross," "Diana Ross and the Supremes," "Diana Ross & the Supremes," and "The Supremes." When I look for duplicate songs in my library, those are all considered "separate" songs & artists.
I really hate Apple Music's/iTunes' album art matching. It seems to only go by song title & artist, not the actual album name, plus on an individual track basis, too! I have a few compilation albums like "Best of Motown." Apple Music would see "I heard it through the grapevine" by Marvin Gaye, but download the album cover art for "Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits" for that song only, leaving the other tracks in the album untouched.
Yeah, I really wish they had separate tags for song title, main artist, featured artist, album name, album edition, etc.
Also, some things should be able to have multiple tags. Like if two people do a duet, be able to add both artists, not make a third, totally separate, third "Artist A and Artist B" artist. Same goes to genre. I have some songs that may be Pop songs, but I have the regular version, an a cappella version, and an instrumental version. Pop and a cappella or pop and instrumental aren't mutually exclusive.
If it's just an embedded XML file or something, it could be like
<song>
<title>Whatever</title>
<artist>
<person>Artist 1</person>
<person> Artist 2</person>
…
<person> Artist N</person>
</artist>
</song>These are good points, especially shining a light on how existing databases (and ones that started prior to the MP3 and streaming era) has issues. Thanks for illuminating!
It's an embedded list of key-value pairs, where keys can repeat. So what you're suggesting is feasible on the file side. Apps just need to be ready for it.
Music librarians had the metadata aspect figured out years ago ("bibliographic control" is key). Apple should hire a team of them, or work out a collaboration with OCLC.
I didn't get to see them until much later, March '91, shortly before they were no more. What a show. What a band. Thinking back I saw a lot of 80's bands just before the end. Ramones included. Damn you Metropol! ?
I would love a decent app for jazz as well. Damm, a good app for music in general.
Take a clue from ROON, it’s recommendation system is incredible. They have actual metadata of the whole crew that worked in a álbum and cross that with the ones you like. So if you like a bass player from a band, you click his/her name and you get a lot of stuff with him included. That and the amount of artists history included makes you want to discover new stuff everyday.
So damm easy to do this. Why do they keep dumb algorithms trying to decide what we like?
Take a clue from ROON, it’s recommendation system is incredible. They have actual metadata of the whole crew that worked in a álbum and cross that with the ones you like. So if you like a bass player from a band, you click his/her name and you get a lot of stuff with him included. That and the amount of artists history included makes you want to discover new stuff everyday.
So damm easy to do this. Why do they keep dumb algorithms trying to decide what we like?
Maybe when they are done with that they can work on a new music app for Apple Music, because the current one kinda sucks.
The easiest and most necessary fix for browsing and searching classical music is to expand the visible text fields. Titles are long in this genre and the way it is now is an embarrassment to every UX designer.
Where does it say this? They're trying to differentiate what's on offer for what is essentially a completely market completely alienated by streaming services.
Designing a music app is trickier than a lot of people will consider because we all have this myopic blind spot; our way of listening to music is "the right way". Some people have their library of favourites and will listen to nothing but AC/DC and Led Zeppelin for the rest of their lives. Others love hearing new music but only along the lines of what they already love. Others still are always trying new stuff, in and out of their preferred genres. Add to that, Apple's USP of human curated playlists AND dozens of personality-lead radio shows, with listen-later recordings, interview clips, DJ playlists. This last curated element is important because it's especially distinctive from Spotify. Most music listening now, I'd imagine, is in playlists or top 40 random singles. Others want the album experience. Like YouTube, Apple Music can be used to get all of the above experiences through music videos only. Some people use Apple Music App as a tool for getting to a song, album, artist or playlist while others are in there browsing... almost like the web – music surfing. And they're hoping a lot of the legwork is done for them... more of a nebulous and serendipitous experience than a structured one.
This isn't to excuse Apple Music's shortcomings – everything can be improved, but it's a consideration that a music app with as many complexities is not a standard UX challenge. In contrast, something like Netflix is used in a very limited way. There are those of us who don't like Spotify's UX and that's specifically a reason to use Apple Music. If they copied that, we'd have no reason to stick with Apple Music.
This isn't to excuse Apple Music's shortcomings – everything can be improved, but it's a consideration that a music app with as many complexities is not a standard UX challenge. In contrast, something like Netflix is used in a very limited way. There are those of us who don't like Spotify's UX and that's specifically a reason to use Apple Music. If they copied that, we'd have no reason to stick with Apple Music.
This is perfect. You can almost tell what kind of music APPLE likes by using the Music app. For all of the Classical Music and Jazz Music I listen to, along with a bunch of garage rock and psych-rock music, why am I still seeing a bunch of suggested garbage? Makes it seem like they don't understand that someone might like Jazz, Classical Music, AND weird rock music. Or they don't know how to incorporate different genres in their suggestions. I hope whatever good these changes bring for Classical Music are trickled down to other genres like Jazz because these same issues come up for that, too. It's a metadata issue really, not a "Classical Music" issue.