The Primephonic Community Forum, which I am hoping becomes part of the AM Classical experience, was a great source of discovery for me.
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Apple Planned to Launch a Classical Music App in 2022, But Time is Running Out
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I don't disagree, but Apple Music metadata generally needs a litte more attention - in particular, it would be very much appreciated if they universally applied title case to track and album titles and were a little more consistent with genre classifications.
Nooooooooooo! Be the big billy goat and knock the bridge dwellers aside!
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Didn’t they just update some TOS recently for this, preparing it to launch?
I've got on the order of a thousand and over the last, say, five years I've been ripping them ALAC lossless, madly curating the metadata into coherence, and then making sure I'm keeping two complete backup sets alongside the original copies, although I should really bump it to three.
So if I seem a little bit bugeyed about how fatally bad classical metadata is, it's because I've been up close and personal with it.
You talk as if they were just starting from Apple Music and... they're not. Well, of course they know how to stream music but they bought a company that was trying to address the problems with classical, such as search, metadata and algorithms. And it will be a custom App, apparently, so I'm not sure what you're worried about. There will surely be some minor issue but in general, classical will probably be handled better than all-genres apps handle anything else.
"Primephonic also operated with a unique pay-per-second-listened model instead of a pay-per-play model like Apple Music..."
I suspect this has become a legal issue for Apple. They inherited Primephonic's contractual agreements with various orchestras, performers and their agents. Copyright laws can be kind'a complex too.
I suspect this has become a legal issue for Apple. They inherited Primephonic's contractual agreements with various orchestras, performers and their agents. Copyright laws can be kind'a complex too.
I wonder, is there an industry standard? I know MARC exists and most major libraries in the US use them, but I am not aware how useful that standard is for cataloguing music albums and songs.
The only thing that works in Apple Music is pop and hip hop. Maybe country, but I can’t stand that music either.
Apple's to-do list:
None of us wants to have two separate apps for music, and try to figure out which app your music is to be found in.
None of us wants to pay extra for the "privilege" of having a classical music platform that actually works, including people who are already paying through the nose for Apple's subscription music services to begin with, for themselves and for their family.
Apple has unfortunately screwed up their implementation of the classical music listening and enjoyment experience for decades now. Rather than adding more services and product offerings to try and excuse their clearly lax attitude towards the genre, it's time for them to step up to the plate and get their entire music service right, for ALL genres.
- Clean up the functionality, user interface and sluggish performance of the existing Apple Music app, so that it can offer a world-class music listening and discovery experience (including so-called "classical music")
None of us wants to have two separate apps for music, and try to figure out which app your music is to be found in.
None of us wants to pay extra for the "privilege" of having a classical music platform that actually works, including people who are already paying through the nose for Apple's subscription music services to begin with, for themselves and for their family.
Apple has unfortunately screwed up their implementation of the classical music listening and enjoyment experience for decades now. Rather than adding more services and product offerings to try and excuse their clearly lax attitude towards the genre, it's time for them to step up to the plate and get their entire music service right, for ALL genres.
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The best thing you can use, file format wise, is FLAC. Of course, FLAC doesn’t play nice in Apple-land but hope springs eternal that may change, eventually.
ALAC and FLAC are both lossless compressed formats as far as the audio content itself goes, but there are some deeper technical differences that leave ALAC at a fundamental disadvantage, as such it can’t be considered an archival grade format and I would not suggest you use it if you intend to make a perfect backup of your CDs you will be keeping around for the long-term.
I presume this is a task you will only want to undertake once. If you really need ALAC for whatever reason, rip to FLAC first, and convert those files to a secondary ALAC copy after the fact so you still have a proper archive to go back to.
As for ripping software, in the PC world EAC is the gold standard. It is not the easiest to configure upon first installation but once it’s set up, it’s fairly simple to operate.
In the Mac world, XLD is the equivalent software but not being a Mac user I really can’t comment on it that much.
As for hardware… yes, some optical drives are better/faster than others, but pretty much anything should be able to make a 100% perfect (veritably accurate and error free) rip of a disc, provided that it it’s in reasonably decent condition.
Either of these programs are very good at detecting/correcting errors when possible and can be configured to compress using FLAC or ALAC.
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Due to ALAC’s A-lack of a stored MD5 checksum per-track, if you really need to use ALAC for whatever reason I would suggest that one of your backups be stored as FLAC. As an additional bonus, the improved compression efficiency of FLAC means that you’ll need less hard drive space to store it than a second copy of the library in ALAC.
Of course, please correct me if I’m wrong but I suspect that if Apple implemented proper FLAC support on their devices you probably wouldn’t want to use ALAC at all
A fresh start would indeed be good... but are you sure that you will be able to find your music in the proper app? What about crossover music with classical elements that could be in either app but you're not sure which?
Better yet for Apple Music would be to keep everything in one place and app, but treat so-called classical music and related genres with the special care it deserves in terms of presenting song titles, keys, artist and composer names, opus conventions, performance locations, orchestral and conductor labels... if Apple Music could only present these correctly for music designated in the "Classical" genre, that would go a long way towards offering a better experience.
That GIF is huge, and super distracting. Could you please tone it down a bit?
Because Apple needed to buy a giant wodge of real, curated, consistent classical metadata, something it very plainly doesn’t have otherwise.