Apple launches its new classical music streaming app for pre-order

This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.<p>But I wonder if it will help with finding <i>which</i> version of a work to listen to. A given symphony or piano prelude might have 100 or more recordings. If you go to classical music forum postings, you can usually find a thread asking &quot;what&#x27;s your favorite performance of...&quot; and quickly find that there are 1 or 2 or 3 versions widely considered the best.<p>I really want a crowdsourced version of this -- both the most-listened and highest-rated recordings of a given work by a given composer. Because it&#x27;s a lot of research to do otherwise.<p>And some people might think it can&#x27;t matter that much, how different could they really be? But it&#x27;s astonishing. The same work in the hands of one conductor+orchestra plods along dead and disjointed and you never want to hear it again, while another one soars full of life, the work <i>makes sense</i> and it becomes your favorite.

Nice, but it would be great if Apple fixed the UI and bugs in Apple Music first.<p>I can&#x27;t hide the non-streaming parts I&#x27;ll never use, but sometimes search keeps directing me to it.<p>And that&#x27;s when searching itself isn&#x27;t wildly broken. A quarter of the time, the search bar loses focus after each character, requiring me to click back in or reboot the app.

Yeah, nice, but I will still use YouTube and Reddit for classical music. I can get access to lesser known composers and artists on YouTube, and Reddit will surface better suggestions and commentary. Even the YT comments are good quality in classical music videos.

Welp, I estimate this will kill my NPR Classical Radio app within a year or so.

One very good streaming service for classical music is idagio.com<p>I can only hope that they won&#x27;t offer auto generated playlists the way Spotify does. No matter what you listen to - Stravinsky, Stockhausen, 12 tone music, baroque, opera - it immediately starts playing the same 3 or 4 pieces by Vivaldi, Satie, Chopin right after the album is finished<p>There was a period where classical music on Spotify was really good. The search results were clearly curated by someone - search for Bach, and artists like Gould and Gardiner would come first; Abbado and Bernstein for Mahler, and so on. Now it&#x27;s much more random - search for Beethoven and you get a lot of &quot;Beethoven for Relaxation&quot; and a lot of recordings that would be no one&#x27;s first choice - while something as essential as Karajan&#x27;s recording of the 9 symphonies is pushed waaaay down in the results

Pretty odd exclusion list:<p>&quot;Available worldwide where Apple Music is offered, excluding China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan.&quot;<p>Is it a rights issue?

Interesting that it took ~18 months to Appleify Primephonic, I hope the extra time in the oven is reflected in polish of the app.<p>The article mentions that Android app is also coming, any guesses for Windows (or Linux...) desktop clients?

Let&#x27;s hope it doesn&#x27;t kill the only radio station with sense but without ads: KDFC

Hopefully there will be a MacOS app as well.

I can’t wait until there’s a different app for every single musical genre, all of which are subscription services! YAY!

&gt; These can be streamed in high-quality audio of up to 192 kHz&#x2F;24-bit Hi-Res Lossless<p>up to. And down to ? 0 bps ?

Great, because we need more specialized apps. I love classical music but I would rather use Spotify for that purpose because at this point I have realized the only thing important for Apple is money. I prefer not to further contribute to a trillion dollar company that has so much restrictions in their ecosystem.