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Apple Failed to Release a Classical Music App in 2022
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I'd like to see they working in a Spotify Connect competitor. Apple Music on Alexa is a terrible experience only because of that.
To Quote Woody Allen:
"In order to appreciate a piece of classical music,
one must know the exact birth date of the composer!"
"In order to appreciate a piece of classical music,
one must know the exact birth date of the composer!"
Should just be one app with all the music in the world. Maybe even merge the iTunes Store in so it’s more like you browse for a song and then can either play it off Apple Music or buy it.
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I personally went the other way, very early Spotify user to Apple Music.
I honestly don’t understand the strong feelings either way.
I’m only an occasional listener of classical music but I’m excited to see what Apple releases!
Hmm.
Good Apple Stuff from 2022
AirPods Pro 2
Apple Watch Ultra
iPhone 14's emergency satellite connection
iPhone 14 Pro's Dynamic Island
M2 MacBook Air
Mac Studio
Meh
A16
iPad line-up
iPhone 14 non-Pro
Mac mini is once again long in the tooth
macOS Ventura's System Settings
Stage Manager
Studio Display
watchOS 9
Failures
Apple Music Classical
Apple Pay Later
Mac Pro
Overall, not their strongest year, but I wouldn't call it a failure.
I'm the same, personally I don't care and a lot of people probably won't. The justification for the app though, seems to be that Song / Album / Artist / Year doesn't really work as well for how classical music is indexed and that. Like there could be so many versions by the same artist, or different instruments etc - from what I understand - I'm no expert.
“Classical Music” in this context is not just one genre of music. Rather, a classification for many, many different genres contained within.
I’ve mentioned this in response to other articles, but as a former Primephonic subscriber, I’ve increasingly noticed that browsing the Classical Music category in the Apple Music app yields a “main” page that reminds me of the Primephonic home page. It makes me think a stand-alone Classical Music app is not coming and that the best aspects of the Primephonic experience are being merged into the Classical genre of Apple Music.
This would be similar to Apple’s treatment of Dark Sky, where they incorporated certain aspects of the Dark Sky experience into their existing weather app.
UPDATE: I’ve yet to see any evidence of the Primephonic search capabilities in Apple Music‘s Classical genre.
This would be similar to Apple’s treatment of Dark Sky, where they incorporated certain aspects of the Dark Sky experience into their existing weather app.
UPDATE: I’ve yet to see any evidence of the Primephonic search capabilities in Apple Music‘s Classical genre.
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That's really it. Apple Music *has* classical music, and can *play* those tracks, but search is so completely malformed and misdirected that you can't find the piece you're looking for.
It's all about metadata and search. Classical on Apple Music now is like a bookstore that files its books by size and color, not author.
Sure sure, because there’s war somewhere the world should stop any other news of any kind.
The issue isn't playing the music, the issue is *finding* what you want. Classical works have very similar names, and the free text search doesn't look at the composer field. It's always a colossal mess trying to get to the piece you want to hear.
Beethoven was writing his symphonies a century before the recorded album, and even after recording came along most composers stayed within the established forms -- symphony, string quartet, song cycle, piano concerto, piano sonata, that sort of thing. Trying to mash that all info into a format designed and optimized for ripped pop CDs can't help but fail.
My distributor refuses to work with Apple when I have a classical release (which is most of my output now). They said Apple makes it really difficult to list classical works with them. Pop recordings are a breeze, however. I was really hoping that Apple Classical was going to fix that problem, but I guess we'll be waiting until some future date to see if it gets straightened out. No other streaming service presents this problem.
It would be a bit embarrassing to release a classical music app, when gapless playback in iOS is currently broken.
All Apple needs for good support for classical is to tweak a couple of features in existing Apple music:
- Fix search by composer, key signature (c-minor) and work/opus/catalog (sonata X, symphony Y, quartet Z, BWV, K, etc.)
- Radio plays full works (all movements), not single tracks
Why disrespect people with different tastes than those of yours? It’s not for you, fine, just walk by if you have nothing nice to say.
Other’s have stated very clearly and precisely why the browsing experience of a classical music catalogue HAS to be different, that’s what this app is supposed to address.
I would add liner notes to this list. About 50% of the entire Primephonic catalog, and nearly 100% of the new releases, included liner notes with each album that discussed not only the works on the album, but the artists as well. I always enjoyed reading them.
Upon hearing this news, my feeling is, I'm so glad we can delete core apps. 🥲
I’m still waiting for exclusive mode for bit perfect playback on DACs without having to change manually every time a song had a different sample rate to the previous one. Also categories for hi res lossless (like what is there for spatial audio) because finding hi res tracks is a pain, there’s a few Beatles albums that have hi res versions, but they’re different listings for the same album and not highlighted in any way.
Why can’t Apple add those metadata fields to properly represent so-called classical music titles in the existing Apple Music app? Wouldn’t that solve the problem for the most part?
We’ve already hashed this out on a separate thread/topic, maybe three weeks ago to my recollection.
Overall a weak year for Apple. Boring iPhone release, M2 higher power usage, no M2 Pro, smaller iPad Pro still without mini-LED, regular iPad with the ridiculous pen charging solution, no OLED options, still no iTunes replacement on Windows, Macbook Air price increase. Hopefully 2023 is better?