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Apple Laying Groundwork for Apple Music Classical Feature Launching in 2022
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That's indeed a problem. Its a challenge to design a screen that has all the right controls and information on it, without bloating. In the past Apple did a very good job on this, but ever since iTunes 11 it went down hill - did they hire Windows programmers or something?
Oh man, don't be like that. You know that ALAC and FLAC are only different in their container structure, the actual possible audio quality is exactly same: ALAC both FLAC can support up to 32bit at all commonly used sample rates.
What you are refering to is the believe that music distributed in ALAC is always 16bit and FLAC is always 24bit. Well, in case of Apple Music, they did indeed publish 16bit/44.1kHz up to a year go. I'm glad Apple changed that, even though it took a while. Today you'll get 24bit or higher when the music producer/label did indeed delivered their library at such high quality. From the few stores I know that deliver FLAC, it used to be not always 24bit either. So this ALAC vs FLAC is no more than a stupid old-school flame-war.
Actually, whatever the container format is what a consumer gets from a digital store, it is in no way a guarantee that what you're getting is really a 24bit resolution recording. It all depends on what was available at the time when it was recorded and what the client/producer wanted then. So many classical recordings that are archived are no better than 16bit@44.1kHz - that was a standard for at least 20 years.
I did some work for classical productions and even though we had the equipment to do proper 24bit@48kHz or even 96kHz recording, but actual recordings some clients wanted was 16bit@48kHz. Some had this idea that a higher bitdepth was bad and had more noise. Obviously they were still living in the early 80ies, when indeed A/D converters were not that good. Today we have idiots at music labels who resample from CD to 24bit@96kHz files and resell this as "studio quality".
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I wish Apple would pay for more new recordings of classical music into proper Atmos spatial audio. Also Apple needs to license Wendy Carlos music, for some reason her recordings are "out of print" on streaming services, which is baffling because one of the very first classical record to sell more than a million copies came from Wendy Carlos and her groundbreaking synths with Switched On Bach. Not to mention her film scores. It's criminal that people can't just stream her music today when she helped popularise classical music with youngsters in the 20th century in the first place!
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Those connoisseurs can convert their FLACs to ALAC and add them to Apple Music themselves. I've done it myself and the albums I converted and added appear in the Apple Music app just like regular music. I guess Apple could automate that conversion process to streamline it a bit, so users just need to drag in the FLAC files to iTunes (now called Music app) and have them converted to ALAC automatically.
I can see myself using this app… but to respond to your question, I think he answered it in his post. Why not make the music app better? Including classical music emphasis. That’s not denying others, it’s working for a larger amount of people.
Of course it will be,..they would have that few subscribers it wouldn't be worth trying to charge extra. I'm waiting for the Hip Hop app & Classic Rock app Apple..c'mon, innovate! 😉
I guess Tim Cook's bean counters want that high end audience, but how will they draw them in, there are an infinite number of ways the classical crowd is catered to, heck there are so many great free classical radio stations around the globe, Timmy can't even create artist only radio stations that are better than Pandora's, so what can his team do in this space?
Side note: Does anyone here know of a streaming station that just consists of modern classical music; John Adams, Glass, and their ilk, I can't seem to find a free one that captures it well, perhaps just a John Adams Pandora station would do the trick, I don't know.
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I once wrote an email to Tim Cook about the Sirius XM TuneMix feature on the Onyx Plus SiriusXM device, the ability to randomly play songs from twenty of your favorite stations, it is a great feature, the closest I have found to your own personal radio station, never got an email response of course, perhaps Apple Music has added that feature at this point, I don't know, but with all of the money Apple makes, you would think they could create the best streaming music service.
I appreciate your take on this. From my perspective -
What kind of service will it be if it is not pushing lossless files (Apple's own or flac or ...)?
A new interface might be a good idea if it is truly oriented to the music and not the "sell" as the present music app is all about.
Makes me think of a timely discussion on BBC Radio 3 recently: “what exactly is classical music”?
What exactly is this new app going to be for?
Just music by orchestras? But what if the orchestra is playing “pop music” covers?
Just music from a certain era? One recent Radio 3 commentator argued Bach is more progressive than Stockhausen. And what about music being made now?
What about contemporary electronic/chamber/electro-acoustic music?
What about “world music”, folk, jazz?
When do things get added to the “classical” descriptor? Will The Beatles be classic in 50 years time?
Improvements in metadata, sorting, discovery, inlay notes*, are much needed. But a whole separate app? A big mistake, in this listener’s opinion. It’ll just create confusion and alienation.
*the lack of the content that existed on the back of LPs / CD inlay cards is the biggest fault of all the streaming platforms. The same with film streaming platforms and the death of the “DVD extras”.
What exactly is this new app going to be for?
Just music by orchestras? But what if the orchestra is playing “pop music” covers?
Just music from a certain era? One recent Radio 3 commentator argued Bach is more progressive than Stockhausen. And what about music being made now?
What about contemporary electronic/chamber/electro-acoustic music?
What about “world music”, folk, jazz?
When do things get added to the “classical” descriptor? Will The Beatles be classic in 50 years time?
Improvements in metadata, sorting, discovery, inlay notes*, are much needed. But a whole separate app? A big mistake, in this listener’s opinion. It’ll just create confusion and alienation.
*the lack of the content that existed on the back of LPs / CD inlay cards is the biggest fault of all the streaming platforms. The same with film streaming platforms and the death of the “DVD extras”.
This is certainly interesting. If it's free as part of the Apple One subscription, I will be able to cancel my Idagio subscription. At the same time, I would feel quite guilty about that. If it's not free, I will keep Idagio and be rather happy that another giant tech company has not been able to put a small company out of business.
I don't get the ALAC vs FLAC issue. It's a streaming service, right? As long as it is streamed in a non-lossy format, what's the problem as to which format? Unless you guys are actually buying tracks (?) All my owned classical music comes from my CD library, which is extensive, and of course is ripped to FLAC. I use BluOS to combine everything, and they support ALAC.
Yeah,a jazz streaming service would be nice, but, like classical, it's only 3% of the market. i always though a classical streaming service would be a great place to do this, jazz fans and classical fans have a lot of the same needs as far as identifying multiple performers etc.
I don't get the ALAC vs FLAC issue. It's a streaming service, right? As long as it is streamed in a non-lossy format, what's the problem as to which format? Unless you guys are actually buying tracks (?) All my owned classical music comes from my CD library, which is extensive, and of course is ripped to FLAC. I use BluOS to combine everything, and they support ALAC.
Yeah,a jazz streaming service would be nice, but, like classical, it's only 3% of the market. i always though a classical streaming service would be a great place to do this, jazz fans and classical fans have a lot of the same needs as far as identifying multiple performers etc.
Anybody who thinks it's a good idea to integrate a specialized classical music search and browse into the existing Apple Music app, which is already bloated beyond recognition, is clearly not a diehard classical music fan. We need the IDAGIO equivalent and that's what the dedicated Apple Classical Music app is for. I'm pretty sure the entire classical music catalog will remain in the regular app to be accessible for people who do mixed playlists of hip-hop and classical, you just won't use the new app, so all will be good, all right?
You are right on many points, but I was not saying ALAC is inferior from an audio quality perspective. As you mention, they are essentially compressed container formats that would both decode to the same original PCM signal, regardless of sample rate or bit depth.
The problem is that ALAC is simply a poor substitute for the format that was actually designed properly from the start, and was only designed by Apple as a spite project when they couldn’t get the rights to FLAC signed over to them. Back in an era when they were not very friendly to the idea of open source projects. Now they are both open source, yet ALAC still falls behind in terms of compression efficiency and data integrity.
The only thing it has going for it is that it plays nice with anything designed in Cupertino. I can’t imagine any valid reason to use it otherwise.
Yes, but no. Sure, they decode to the same original PCM input, only an idiot would claim otherwise. Nobody is arguing that. But why are ALAC files so bloated compared to FLAC files? Why don’t they store an MD5 of the audio data? They’re bigger and less secure. One of these things is not like the other
Switched on Bach is a very cool record, but I am fairly certain it’s far from the first to sell over a million copies, even within the classical genre. If opera is within the realm of classical, I’m fairly sure there were some Caruso records in the 1910’s that hit that mark likely 50 years before Switched on Bach was even recorded.
Wendy took ownership of her masters from Columbia/Sony, so if things are not kept in print or are unavailable on streaming services, the onus falls on them to do something about it.
I would never suggest converting one’s digital music library to the bloated/inefficient and less secure lossless alternative just to play nice within the Apple ecosystem. I wouldn’t do it to my files if I had a gun to my head. Instead I ask Apple to do better and support both.
If it’s streaming, I couldn’t care less as to what format Apple uses - it’s understandable they’d want to use their own thing for whatever reason. Though you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here. A lot of my owned music comes from my CD library too, and exactly as you said “of course is ripped to FLAC”
So why does Apple continue to treat you and I and all the people with FLAC libraries like second class citizens? We have no way of adding our own music to the device’s native music library. We are continuously told to either sideload files into sandboxed 3rd party music apps, or convert to ALAC. Why do the Apple sycophants keep defending such blatantly anti-consumer behavior?
The lossy equivalent to this would be if it was 2003 and Apple refused to support MP3, despite that being what most people were actually using for their personal library throughout the 2000’s. Apple never would have escaped widespread criticism if that were the case.
Wikipedia says Switched-On Bach "was the second classical album to sell over one million copies".