Apple Music Classical

I signed up for Apple Music to get access to the Classical app because I thought it would be on par with the regular app and literally every other music app out there. I’ve been using Spotify with the Concertmaster front-end to listen to classical music and the experience isn’t the best. It’s laggy, often breaks, falls out of sync, etc. I thought AMC would be a better way to listen to classical music that is smoother, higher quality, and (most importantly) free with my new airpods for 6 months. But this is very much not the case. The AMC app is missing nearly everything that makes the regular AM app good. There is no shuffle play or infinite play, there is no new music mix, there is no radio, nothing! I have to choose a specific album and play just that, then when it finishes find another. There isn’t even a way to queue pieces! Discovering new pieces is nigh impossible. The organization of AMC is also pretty terrible too. The app is just like AM in that it shows you albums that have been recently released. The thing is, this doesn’t work for classical music. The primary information I want to see and to find pieces is who wrote the piece and what it’s called. I don’t really care who’s playing pieces and releasing albums, and albums often only include one or two movements of a piece where I want to listen to the whole thing. It would be much better to show pieces whose recordings have been released recently and make the performance the secondary information, not the primary. If I want to try and find new pieces by an obscure composer, there’s not much way for me to do that other than manually scroll through a list of every composer out there. Working withing the album paradigm Apple has chosen, older recordings of pieces are similarly buried unless you have a specific piece you’re looking at, which again is terrible for discovery. The Concertmaster app does pretty much everything better. It shows the piece first and the recordings second. If I want to look at a certain composer or time period, I can sort the pieces by type and by instrument. It also gives me a radio where I can specify time period, instruments, types of pieces, and even specific composers. When I click play, I get to hear whole pieces and all of their movements put together and marked, and the performance of that piece is chosen automatically. It’s so much easier to just hit play and listen and not have to constantly be tapping around and finding things. Maybe I’m missing something and

This app is great, the only thing I would change is to have the shuffle feature on playlist and add a Mac app, other than that it perfect!

Overall this is a really encouraging start. There is much that is great about this app for classical music compared to the iTunes app. But my top of the list feature please would be the ability to give feedback through the app - especially related to metadata/track labelling errors when a user finds them. Given the vast amount of available music it is unsurprising errors arise, and it’s not clear how I could report these (really not keen on being on Twitter if that is the only other way to give feedback)

This App is brilliant. I am 77 and this is what I have been looking for my whole life. There is so much beautiful music here. I am listening to Verdi’s “Un Giorno di Regno” at the moment. I thought I would never hear it again after my LP collection was lost because my hearing detiorsted so much. Thanks to Apple, Bluetooth and good headphones I can hear my favourite mudic again. If I were forced to pick only one App it would be this.

I love this new app. It’s really nice to have endless classical music in one place. It makes learning about classical music and discovering new composers and albums much easier. It is a great addition to my Apple Music subscription, making it even better value. Spotify can go take a jump in a lake!

I would like to see this particular app available to add to Sonos as a music service. It’s great and would improve the experience for people who listen to Sonos music systems.

Come on Apple.

Firstly, kudos to Apple for taking classical music seriously. The app is a huge improvement on the standard app, never mind what is offered by competitors. Two features that would make it even better would be an iPad version, and the ability to shuffle playlists

App does not scale to iPad, show in car via CarPlay or integrate with some smart speakers. Also content wise is very poor for Opera.

Streaming services have been inadequate for classical music, grouping so much under the single genre label, missing the distinctions between artists, composers, period and composers. I really like the many ways I can browse music here. It should possibly be a native app to iOS and the iPhone, so that no one misses out on this! It would be good too to see an integration too with iTunes when signed in, to allow both my library and the general store be divided in these ways, and to pick up from a playlist between the app and iTunes. It would also be good to have a history feature, to see what’s just been played as well as what’s ahead (as in the regular app).