Apple Failed to Release a Classical Music App in 2022

[newton4000]

Apple also failed to release new running shoes or a smoothie machine in 2022.

All the hate here is always astounding.
Apple bought and CLOSED down Primephonic - which was serving many of us well. If you do not like Classical Music and see no use in this, why are you on this thread?

 

[Rookbird¥]

I hope they do come out with it. I hate Apple‘s music app. I listen to classical a lot yet every time I open their music app front and center on the main page seems to always be rock and rap music. It doesn’t even try to display the kind of music I listen too.

 

[Piplodocus]

Yes, they only have to provide an option for a classical music type of contextual search filters as on IDAGIO and Primephonic. I’m OK with that and I don’t need a separate app. But the current free text search is a mess, even for non-classical music.

Yep, gimme one Apple Music app, just with better search. A lot of these things will work for jazz and other music too.

 

[bradamant]

I've created an account just to comment on this. I think CyberGene has covered a lot of it but one thing I haven't seen mentioned in any discussion on any site as a key difference between classical music and pop music is that with classical music being largely out of copyright, there are often MANY RECORDINGS of the same piece. For something like Pachelbel's Canon, I'm sure it's thousands.

This means that you need good metadata not just to keep the 4 movements of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik connected in some way, or to allow you to find "4. Symphonie" as well as "Fourth Symphony" but to be able to tell that two recordings are of the SAME PIECE. Imagine how terrible any kind of "radio" experience will be without this! I remember listening to Pandora years ago when it first came out. It could play an extremely frequently recorded piece multiple times in the same hour! The system thought they were different because it was technically different recordings, but it was the "same song" if you will.

I tend to listen to classical music, say, 3-9 hours a day between working and reading--depending on how many meetings I have--and Primephonic was by far the best experience of non-human-selected classical "radio" ever. Not only did it have moods like "peaceful" or "energetic," you could do "chamber music" radio and then if you wanted, even "AND" a period on to that, like "chamber music + romantic" radio. And they had enough music described properly that it could play for hours without repeating. I was constantly discovering new pieces, and even whole new composers which is pretty cool considering I've been an avid listener for 30+ years!

Neither Apple Music nor Spotify can do anything like this. They're still at "here's comes Beethoven's 5th again" level. After Primephonic died I subscribed to iDagio which tries to do similar things, but not as well--the catalog of recordings may be deep but the metadata isn't as good as Primephonic's.

 

[tubular]

I remember listening to Pandora years ago when it first came out. It could play an extremely frequently recorded piece multiple times in the same hour!

Sooner or later, every Pandora classical list ends up simply alternating between the Canon in D and "Appalachian Spring."

 

[bradamant]

Sooner or later, every Pandora classical list ends up simply alternating between the Canon in D and "Appalachian Spring."

It would be like if the rock music catalog were available for re-recording and most groups stuck to recording classic songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You're listening to the radio while answering email in the morning and you just can't take hearing a third rendition of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"!

 

[BathHammer]

That's only one part of the problem: being able to find an exact match of what you're searching for. It's a bit tricky since many of the performers have names with accented letters, works are in various European languages, etc. but OK, I agree with you. But that doesn't work currently. You can find more popular composers, works and conductors but often the metadata is missing and the only way to find it is to somehow know the name of the CD that contains what you're looking for and that's because tracks are entered in the database with missing metadata, there are often tracks that are named like "IV", e.g. the fourth movement of a symphony without that track actually having a composer/work assigned to it...

But more importantly, services like IDAGIO and Primephonic are about browsing the catalog. Many classical fans would like to see all the performances of a particular work, so they would start with the composer, then find the work within the list, then narrow it down by e.g. a conductor or soloists (any they often record one and same work with different orchestras, even on different occasions). This is why apps like Primephonic existed. Because Apple Music catalog is arguably one of the best and I've found more classical recordings in it than IDAGIO. But you must know what you're searching for and be persistent and lucky.

Not sure if many of you realize one very distinctive and apparent thing about classical music: yes, there's a CD (AKA album, recording) with classical music but often it contains multiple works by various composers. In the old-fashioned way you would be interested in a particular work and would find 10 different CD-s of different performers with a mix of many other works and composers and you would then listen in a targeted way only to that particular work, e.g. a symphony. What Primephonic and IDAGIO really excelled at is to offer you the possibility to treat these not as CD-s but as separate entities, each having the full set of metadata, so you can compare different performances of the same work easily without having to think of "CD-s", or see all the latest recordings of a pianist, or all the records of a conductor with a certain orchestra.

Honestly, I'm not sure why Apple bought Primephonic. It seemed they wanted to use the search engine and the thorough metadata about each recording in their catalog. But no, they just killed it and left people without much choice. Well, there's IDAGIO but Apple promised the Primephonic experience only to abandon it, as it seems.

If I may suggest something to Apple. Right, you decided not to create a separate app or improve Apple Music. Why not just start paying a small fee to IDAGIO, so that people can use their search engine freely (as I currently do) but forward to the corresponding Apple Music recording instead. As I said, that's what I do, I use IDAGIO browse/search, then I check what the CD/album is that contains the corresponding item and try to find it back on Apple Music more easily by using correct spelling of artists, CD name, etc. But, Apple, please, don't kill IDAGIO too...

What puzzles me is why the enthusiasts who set up Primephonic sold out to Apple. I suppose they received an offer they couldn’t refuse but they came across as very genuine & not in it for the money. Their Main reason was to reach a bigger audience. That’s worked well hasn’t it!

 

[Muhammadazam]

I'd like to see they working in a Spotify Connect competitor. Apple Music on Alexa is a terrible experience only because of that.

How to connect Spotify to Alexa | Play Spotify on Alexa

Spotify has become our one-touch music-listening platform and in an era of automation, it is also necessary to play music through automated software (Amazon Ech

smarthomehut.com

You can follow the article to better under stand and know playlist commands as well