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Hands-On With Apple's New Classical Music App

antiprotest said:
Can someone recommend the best version of Liszt's La Campanella?

It's partly preference of course but it'd be nice to hear what people think.
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Don't really have a recco because I'm not a fan of Liszt.

But out of curiosity, I compared the results of searching for albums with the piece in Apple Music and Apple Classical and the latter was the clear winner, though only on the third try.

Searching "liszt campanella" (without quotes) on both came up with only a handful of results. Since the piece is one of Liszt's Grandes études de Paganini, I then tried searching that with pretty disastrous results in both apps. Then I tried "liszt paganini". Music shows 3-4 dozen albums/tracks but with lots of repeats. Classical starts with a list of three works, of which the Grandes études is the first (with 316 albums/tracks) followed by a short list of albums (with a See All Albums link), a short list of tracks (ditto) and a few playlists.

Clicking on the Grandes études de Paganini link gives you a screen with an Editor's Choice (Daniil Trifonov's DG recording, which is probably a decent recco) and five Popular Recordings (one of which is the Trifonov). Select See All and you get the full 300+ list. Personally, I'd probably scroll down and try one of Emil Gilels' recordings but, then again, I'm not a Liszt expert.

Anyway, with some work (including consulting Wikipedia to see which work "La Campanella" is drawn from), Classical proved the better option, though far from perfect.

And what would perfect be? Typing "liszt campanella" in the search box and being presented with a complete list of albums/tracks and an adjacent list of performers, which is the way it works in Idagio.
 
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antiprotest said:
Can someone recommend the best version of Liszt's La Campanella?

It's partly preference of course but it'd be nice to hear what people think.
Click to expand...
Also, Take a look at this young and blind pianist. It is one of his signature encores. I saw him play it live at the Hollywood Bowl and it was stunning.

Nobuyuki Tsujii​


 
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carswell said:
When you search Beethoven symphony 2, the work doesn't even appear on the first results page (symphonies 5, 9, 8, 7 and 3 do
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Found the only person who listens to classical music, apparently. This is totally unacceptable, what were they doing? I don't mind missing compatibility or features, these can be added later. But a fundamental lack of understanding how classical music is organized and searched by people is much more difficult to fix.
 
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VERY surprised: no iPad, no Mac and nor CarPlay? Same classical music you can get from Spotify or Tidal:) I see no point
 
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They’ve done a decent job with composer names — a search on Strawinski (alternative spelling used often in German recordings) correctly finds Stravinsky as the featured composer. They do need someone more dedicated to early music (for the 1% niche of the 1% niche of classical) to get the names right there: Jacopo da Bologna (Jake from Bologna) needs to be abbreviated and sorted under Jacopo, not da Bologna, Bologna, or J da Bologna. But otherwise a decent first attempt.
 
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jamezr said:
why is this a separate app? We already have classical music option in Apple Music.
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It's an issue with tagging and searching.

Think of it like this. The LP came out in the late 1940s. Before that, the concept of "album" as we know it is basically meaningless. Yet most of the classical repertory was written before the 1940s.

Most music and streaming apps: song/artist/album

Classical: composer/work/movement/performer

It just doesn't work trying to force that into song/artist/album. So searching for specific classical works in the Apple Music app fails remarkably often. Sure, Apple Music can play the track if you find it ... but that's a big "if."

@%<
 
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A few initial reactions, searching only (haven't had a chance to listen yet):

The great news is Apple is getting to grips with the metadata. So far, it seems they've done a good job of imposing consistency (what librarians call authority control) on names of people, ensembles, and works. And because of that, once you figure out how it all works it's now easier to track down specific recordings. And I'm delighted to see producers, engineers, and (ahem) record label given proper credit for some (not all) recordings. You can't search them, but the information is there.

With that firm base, Apple can now refine the app.

Drill-down searching has always been a good method for classical recordings. Apple does it only part way thus far. (Or maybe it's a work-in-progress and they're working towards some revolutionary new search method down the pike that will do miracles I cannot even imagine.) For instance, when you get to the point where you see a list of all the recordings of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, say, they appear to be in order of popularity. C'mon, now, get out of the kid-stuff mindset, Apple! Classical listeners as a rule aren't that interested in popularity. We want to see everything available, hopefully in some kind of obvious order, such as...good old reliable alphabetical. But there, too, some fine-tuning would be needed: the brief information in the list of recordings mostly shows only the orchestra involved, not the conductor, which it's essential to know, arguably moreso than orchestra.

"Library," right now, is all confusion to me. It only shows my actual library if I choose Albums or Tracks. (The latter is comically useless, by the way. Nobody looks for the track in their library called "I. Allegro.") If I choose Artists, Recordings, Works, or Composers, I'm prompted to add my "favorites." I don't see the logic of that, or the point. I want to see all works in my library by Beethoven, and then see what recordings of those works I have. It's doesn't help me at all, so far as I can tell, to mark Beethoven as a favorite composer. Note to Apple: You're putting too much emphasis on popularity and favorites. Classical listeners don't really think that way so much. Anyway, for me, "Library" is a complete miss right now. I won't be using it until it's overhauled.

Searching beyond drill-down: An advanced search should be possible in which one can combine, say, Composer, Soloist, and Label. (Also, I should be able to browse by label.)

Anyway, Apple is off to a good start. Heartening to see them start to take music and us listeners seriously. Now that they're learning how to control metadata for classical, let's hope they can apply it to music in all genres. As others have mentioned, there are alternative classical streaming sites out there that Apple should really study. (I can't imagine they haven't.) I'm excited to see how this develops!
 
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FWIW I took out an old dust-gathering iPhone SE (original generation) and put the app on that so I can stream to my HomePods (also OG).

I'm enjoying it.

Incidentally, this app *does* work on the iPad, it's just formatted for the iPhone, so you have to zoom in. So I may replace the old dust-gathering iPhone SE with an old dust-gathering iPad mini.
 
user314159 said:
Sort by popularity is based on what??
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If I had to implement this feature, I would sort sccording to how often it is played / searched for. Since the service is totally new, none of them are popular. There's a huge bias towards the first entries, I hope they use some randomization to account for that.

user314159 said:
And what if I wanted to find the pianist who played it the absolute fastest
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Can't believe they don't show the duration.
 
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guisimonello said:
The app has a lot to improve, whose idea was to sync everything from/to my Apple Music? If I want to add classical composers to my Apple Music library as well, why would I download a separate music app?
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On the other hand, I like this feature very much 🤷‍♂️

Let's me use the new app to browse, choose, study, etc., then use the Music app to playback my favorites wherever I like (e.g., AppleTV, CarPlay, etc.).
 
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tubular said:
It's an issue with tagging and searching.

Think of it like this. The LP came out in the late 1940s. Before that, the concept of "album" as we know it is basically meaningless. Yet most of the classical repertory was written before the 1940s.

Most music and streaming apps: song/artist/album

Classical: composer/work/movement/performer

It just doesn't work trying to force that into song/artist/album. So searching for specific classical works in the Apple Music app fails remarkably often. Sure, Apple Music can play the track if you find it ... but that's a big "if."

@%<
Click to expand...
Your answer is a good one, but folks are going to keep asking the same question about the need for a separate app over and over and over anyway.
 
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mediacomposer said:
The iOS app is tight - but I'd love a TV app so I can use my atmos setup
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As others have said: add the items you find in Classical to your your library. Then, they are visible in Apple Music and can be played anywhere - I'm currently listening to a BUNCH of selections in Atmos over my AppleTV hooked to my main Atmos system, and looking forward to having them available via CarPlay, as well.
 
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stevefeinstein said:
As far as I can tell there's nothing here you can't also access in Apple Music. So a car play version would be nice, but not essential. Use the app, ask Siri for what you want, or make a playlist and keep your eyes on the road.
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Agreed. Probably because CarPlay is meant to display minimalist information while driving. Trying to display maximalist information on a car display means Driver Distraction, a great way for hundreds of greedy lawyers to sue Apple for driver accidents and deaths.

The basic vanilla iTunes CarPlay interface is probably sufficient for CarPlay dashboards
 
chouseworth said:
Your answer is a good one, but folks are going to keep asking the same question about the need for a separate app over and over and over anyway.
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That's because they aren't very bright and have no idea what they are talking about. If they listened to this kind of music, they would understand why it needs to be different. We could wish that there was a government department for the answering of daft questions, but sadly there isn't (and they would be overloaded anyway).

It's as if people in the city kept wondering why farmers used 4WD pickups when they could get by perfectly with a compact sedan.
 
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Agathon said:
That's because they aren't very bright and have no idea what they are talking about.
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Well, this is the kind of response that gets classical listeners called elitist. There are plenty of smart people out there who, for whatever reason, didn't get exposed to classical. I hope Apple Classical Music piques their curiosity.

In fact, Apple has made a point of building and highlighting a nine-part podcast-ish introduction to classical for newbies -- medieval to 21st century -- by their classical editor-in-chief exactly to include people, bring them in. It starts out by saying: nobody knows all there is to know about classical, there's too much of it, and everyone has something to learn.

And in that spirit, I'm starting with the podcasts, never actually having had a history of music class.
 
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