Yes, I was happy to find "The Story of Classical", too. But with each section being an hour or so, it's disappointing that it doesn't remember your place in each track.
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Hands-On With Apple's New Classical Music App
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Yeah, it's very suboptimal. In the desktop apps, iTunes and Apple Music, you can at least create a smart playlist with Composer != "" and Genre = "Classical" and view it with a composers list in one pane, albums in the other. This helps some, but there are still two big problems, (1) Mozart is sorted under "W", Schubert under "F", etc, and (2) if you have any "semi-classical" music like Lucia Micarelli albums, you'll get an explosion of non-classical composers, often multiple songwriters per track and permutations thereof, which BTW is what makes the standard Composers view utterly useless. The ultimate solution is to create smart playlists for every composer you care about, named as you like, e.g. "Mozart", "Ravel", etc. Unfortunately, this doesn't help the iPhone Apple Music app, which can only view playlists as tracks, and the playlists don't show up in Apple Music Classical or the web app at all.
There's nothing elitist about requiring people to have a base familiarity with something before commenting about it.
Thanks for drawing attention to this. Although I have listened to classical music and even played some, I also need a primer and this is pretty good.
Use my iPad for music. Love classical music. How did you get it to work on your iPad? Please help!
I have no problem with adding to my regular Apple Music playlist. I made one specifically for clasique tracks.
I know. It gets really tedious, especially after many explanations (over several stories) as to why a separate app makes a ton of sense. It's like many don't want to read, contemplate, and learn.
Best to ignore them, I suppose.
On your iPad, go to the App Store, search for Apple Classical (you may have to scroll down the results list a little) and download it. It's the iPhone app but, while not optimized for a tablet, it works.
All of this time, and they only delivered an iPhone app. So bizarre. I was able to install onto iPad, but it was still an iPhone app. What is happening over at Apple?
Absolutely useful. When in discovery mode in Tidal a movement from a Nielsen symphony might play and I'll think "my college roommate used to play that" pointing me to the whole symphony. If I had perfect memory then I suppose I could shuffle through everything I've ever heard to chose what to listen to but I don't.
I think one has to expand a bit on this. Because if you reorder it, people could still think it works fairly well and don't see the problem at all:
artist/album/song
vs.
composer/work/movement
However, the real problem is that in classical music a lot of things have the same names. Movements (= the actual songs) are just a number and a tempo/mood, e.g. "I - Allegro", so thousands have the exact same name in multiple works (imagine pop songs just having the album track number as their only name). Also, composers write works with the same names all the time, e.g. "Symphony No. 1" (imagine every pop singer releasing "Studio Album 1"). And all of these works are played by hundreds of performers/orchestras/conductors, so everything is the same except the performer (imagine hundreds of equally famous song covers). And of course one performer may even have multiple recordings of the same piece. Then there is the chronological enumeration of each composer's works. These can be the same for different composers, e.g. "Op. 27 No. 2" is a Beethoven Sonata and a Chopin Nocturne. Then there are also nick names like "Moonlight Sonata", of course called differently in other languages. Such names can even be the same for multiple pieces by the same composer. For example, Schubert's "Ständchen" (D 889, D 957 No. 4). Finally, a work is often referred to by the key it is written in, like Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in C-sharp minor", which again is called differently in other languages if the original recording was produced for the local market.
To sum it up, names are confusingly generic and it doesn't help that generally a lot of numbers and abbreviations are involved and people make typos (E-flat vs. -sharp, who cares/knows) or are lazy. "Chopin 10" is an Opus number (piano etudes), but "Beethoven 3" is the 3rd symphony, Op. 55.
Presenting this information in a way people can easily find what they need is the big challenge, and it looks like they haven't completely succeeded yet. But in any case, browsing and searching certainly can be made much better if the classical context is known. It therefore makes perfect sense to have its own app.
For example because with the Music app on your Mac you can stream the music found in the Classical app via Airplay in high lossless quality to an Airport express, while with an iPhone you can stream via Airplay only in 256 kbps AAC.
Shuffle would be nice for 'Periods and Genres' too. At the moment I have the Romanticism Period playlist airplaying to my Mac Studio - as background music to World of Warcraft
For searchability, for example by orchestra, etc. Can’t do that in Apple Music!
Your homage to Apple Music Classical.... poetry at its finest!
I have Had Classical Music on the Music app for a long time. My Own! Long time ago I put in my Mac a lot of classical and soundtrack CD's. I have no desire to pay for it again with an Apple Music subscription. Now if Apple would open up their Bundles to have iCloud, Music, Apple TV and News, I would pay for that. I don't want Games. I pay for iCloud and TV right now.
Can anyone tell me if there's any way to get it to show me my existing library full of classical music? I don't want to subscribe to Apple Music or any other service, I just want to play my 1000+ CDs which I have laboriously ripped to a media server.
I admit I'm a bit chickensh!t for not downloading and poking at it myself. I'm still too pissed by the announcement from a couple weeks ago when they suddenly made it clear it was going to be focused on streaming.
I admit I'm a bit chickensh!t for not downloading and poking at it myself. I'm still too pissed by the announcement from a couple weeks ago when they suddenly made it clear it was going to be focused on streaming.
Maybe because this question has been answered as clearly as possible over and over again, and it still comes up several times a day. You can only reply politely so many times before you get pissed off and start being snobby and pompous. Besides, it seems to me many of those who keep asking this question are asking it rethorically and are more interested in boasting their opinion than in an actual answer.
I could do with a similar app for dance music and for dancehall reggae. Ideally I’d have separate search fields for artist, producer, vocalist, MC, remixer, engineer, riddim, label, original label, etc. Then there’s the treatment of dj mixes. Dance music is a lot more complicated than artist / song.
Some of the criticisms regarding its features or missing features are valid, and these will hopefully come in future updates, but it's still a wonderful app and I've discovered some amazing pieces of music, and the effort that has gone into curating the library is commendable. It will no doubt rekindle many people's interest in classical. I wonder how it's been received by professional classical musicians and producers? I wonder if a jazz version is warranted if that genre is large enough to sustain its own repertoire library and app?