IIRC, Apple bought another service. If it's the case, then it's probably best, because when Apple bought Beats Music and brought it home, it was a MESS. It screwed up everyone's music libraries etc.
So probably for the best.
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Everything New in the iOS 15.5 Beta: Apple Classical References, Apple Pay Cash Updates and More
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So probably for the best.
I suspect the causality is the other way around: they bought that app because they felt they needed a new UI for a good, different classical information hierarchy.
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Makes a great deal of sense, and I'm really looking forward to it after twenty years of seeing how inadequate the iTunes approach to classical music is.
I think this is right. The fundamental classical problem is that the metadata is a mess, and the secondary problem is that using that metadata in an artist/album/track world is a mess. They can solve the first one by buying a good metadata registery. Solving the second takes a different app.
Qobuz in my experience (usually) has the best/most complete metadata for all manner of classical/orchestral recordings, with all the proper tagging for conductor, composer, orchestra, etc. and they offer master quality hi-res streaming as well.
The fact that they couldn’t immediately figure this out in Apple Music itself goes to show how little they actually care about getting these things right. They only love music as a virtue signal
If I was guessing I would think this goes in iOS 16 as a feature. At present they have code in 15 just for their testing. I hope I am wrong, just a feeling I have as it may make a bigger news impact in a new iOS.
Perhaps it’s easier on the revenue side for them to have a separate app since they don’t have to pay royalty to dead people. And still charge their customers.
Funny thing is I can totally see that happening under Tim Cook.
Somehow I like the idea of having something where the metadata is carefully curated (composers, performers, conductors, labels, links to available versions/covers, etc) but I'm wondering how this will be implemented:
* Which kind of 'classical' content will include? Where do you put the frontier between classical/pop music? There are pop covers of classical music and classical-styled covers of pop music. There's even ambient electronic music considered as classical nowadays. What about soundtracks?
* Will it be compatible with user's iCloud library? Will we need to access classical music from its specific app or all the content will still be available from the Music app?
* What about iTunes match or songs that users can upload to their library? Will the Classical app also support uploading music or will users have to split their libraries?
This has the potential to go from something great to a complete mess.. let's hope for the first..
* Which kind of 'classical' content will include? Where do you put the frontier between classical/pop music? There are pop covers of classical music and classical-styled covers of pop music. There's even ambient electronic music considered as classical nowadays. What about soundtracks?
* Will it be compatible with user's iCloud library? Will we need to access classical music from its specific app or all the content will still be available from the Music app?
* What about iTunes match or songs that users can upload to their library? Will the Classical app also support uploading music or will users have to split their libraries?
This has the potential to go from something great to a complete mess.. let's hope for the first..
I just want iPadOS to be more like MacOS, it's frustrating that so much power of iPad Pro goes to waste
I’ve used it at the gym for two hours a day 5 days a week and it’s never crashed once. What sort of bugs are we talking ?
I don't think this makes any difference revenue-wise. Maybe they'll do a classical-only tier of Apple Music, but I'm currently guessing no.
I don't expect this to change the content side.
They'll simply move some songs from one app to another. The user interface changes; the service does not.
That's precisely what I wouldn't want to happen. I don't want to constantly switch apps to listen to different content. I just hope the Classical app is built as a subset of the content available in the Music app. This way we could still create smart playlists that includes any kind of content for instance.
Imagine that the macOS filesystem is now splitted between regular files and photos and you have to use two different Finder applications to access them. Seriously?
It basically is split, and you basically do have to use two (or more) different apps. You can theoretically browse into the contents of the Photos library, but it isn't really designed for that; instead, you browse photos with the Photos app. You also browse e-mail with the Mail app, music with the Music app, etc.
Shoebox-style library apps have been around since around the advent of iTunes. And since this about iOS: that has always been even more sandboxed.
The filesystem is not split since you can use Finder or other utilities to find any file.
Not all photos are meant to be imported to the Photos Library. My point was broader, replace 'photos' with any other kind of file (pdf, txt, ...).
Would you prefer searching music only within Music app or within two apps (Music/Classical)? I'm ok with two apps as long as the first one includes the other as well. Having to search in both apps in order to find a song is not a good experience.
It depends on which abstraction level you define "file system". If you go even lower-level, it is also split: what Finder pretends is a single volume is actually multiple volumes these days. If you go higher-level and define it as "the totality of files you deal with", lots of stuff we might have at one point considered "files" aren't designed to be accessible in Finder any more. So, from a user's point of view, it's been the case for at least two decades that, no, you aren't meant to directly access everything from the Finder.
This doesn't really affect me one way or the other.
oh like how, since I dont really feel it is that kind of trashy, only that the interface is quite hard to use sometime.
What did you expect? It’s already late in the lifespan of iOS 15 and they finally delivered every features that was announced for iOS 15 with 15.4.
15.5 won’t bring any noticeable changes. Even a 15.6 (if there will be one) won’t be thrilling.
Ok, here's my take on the whole Classical Music app thing.
I'm glad that Apple feels they need to do something about the Apple Music app, but what they're focussing on seems to suggest they may actually make it worse, not better, which will be quite an achievement if they pull it off!
100%. The metadata is ultimately the issue here, and I'm not an expert on that, I just know that Apple Music handles it terribly and cannot differentiate reliably between a performer and a composer, while Spotify (for instance) does this very easily. In some ways, if a new app were to fix that for Classical, great, but the problem manifests itself within the popular/jazz etc idioms also. If a song has multiple credited writers, Apple Music categorises it differently from a song with only one writer. It's unable to produce a playlist of (for instance) all the songs written by one person. And a separate app will make that worse: ideally if I want to create a playlist with examples of Hans Zimmer's work, I want to see stuff from Inception, No Time to Die, Dune, yes, but also the Buggles. Apple Music can't do that, and I doubt splitting it into two apps will help.
I agree it should be supported, but i reckon a significant majority of Classical music listeners still are ripping CDs at 44.1Khz - and I would argue that unless you're listening on equipment significantly more expensive than I'll ever be able to afford you won't tell the difference between a well-mastered CD and a FLAC file. But that's a different argument - yes, it should be supported, because I don't think it's that hard.
Makes no difference. The royalties paid out for any streamed music are unbelievably small and in any case they go predominantly to the performing artist rather than the composer. Classical music still needs to be performed by someone, and they're the ones who will be getting the pittance of a royalty fee. You also have conveniently forgotten about the significant number of "Classical" composers who are either still alive, or who died less than 70 years ago and are therefore (in most of the world) still in copyright.
And that's the real point. For Apple to announce this in the same week as there was a huge uproar over Jon Baptiste being nominated for the "Best Contemporary Classical Composition" Grammy shows how out of step they are. Classical Music is not easily defined - yes, Mozart is clearly in one camp and Megadeath in the other, but Metheny straddles the line sometimes, as do certain genres more broadly such as Minimalism. Putting labels on things can be useful, but in this case it's not helpful. Will Apple Music split Jon Baptiste's album "We Are" across two apps because it contains music in more than one category? Or Bruce Hornsby's album "Solo Concerts" which contains music from his early years (The Way It Is etc) but also Messiaen? This is a nonsense.
I'm glad that Apple feels they need to do something about the Apple Music app, but what they're focussing on seems to suggest they may actually make it worse, not better, which will be quite an achievement if they pull it off!
Nobody should be able to tell the difference between a CD and a FLAC file, because there IS no difference. That’s literally the entire point of a lossless encoder.
The vast majority of my classical library is personally ripped 16/44.1 FLAC from original CDs with .log/.cue, 100% bit for bit identical to the CDs they came from.
You’re right that this is how most classical listeners are listening these days. CD is still king if only due to the incredible amount of content that has been released over the past 40 years, but only a means to an end for modern listeners - the resultant FLAC file.
Limiting users to sandboxed 3rd party apps is the biggest way for Apple to show that they do not care about the people who care about music. This convoluted third rate experience completely flies in the face of “it just works”
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