NML

For classical music, it’s tough to beat the sheer breadth and depth of the Naxos Music Library. The app’s interface for browsing and listening is not on par with the best commercial apps, but it’s serviceable and has allowed me to find both old favorites and some new treasures in the classical realm. My biggest complaint is the app’s odd fixation on “playlists” as the primary mechanism for saving and organizing music. While the app is excellent at highlighting new and featured albums, I see no obvious way to save albums as albums, apart from moving all the tracks on an album into a playlist and manually naming it something I hope I can recognize in the future. I would love to be able to move a newfound album into a manually defined favorite folder or category in one step—and then view my favorites as the same mini-album covers shown in “new” and “featured”—but I see no way to do that.

The app takes more than 1GB memory of my phone. That’s ridiculous! The gapless playback is awesome. Hope can add shortcuts for accessing the album page of the music being played.

I spend more time waiting for the app to load than listening to music

This app constantly has issues with unavailable tracks which worked earlier in the day or will not load. The delay between tracks which segue into another is really unacceptable for a PAID service only app. Especially compared to non classical focus apps, this really has a lot of problems making it at times just unusable as a fully paid app. Reloading an app multiple times is not fantastic nor convenient. Would not use if I was not a student using a university login, but because so few sites offer classical music only this is really the only choice as most universities are subscribed. I would not recommend the app. I would say to use the laptop site version over this if you have to use service. Another aspect is how the app stops playing when you are in other apps like Facebook or something and it won’t pick back up unless you go to the app to hit play again or pull down to tap play.

There are a few annoying bugs. Sometimes I get logged out unexpectedly. Sometimes the back button doesn't take you back to the same part of the list you left, so you have to scroll all the way down again. It's time consuming and easy to get lost. And various other glitches that probably shouldn't have passed QA testing.

The company runs by some charlatans that the only thing they care about is money. They charge a lot but do not have even decency to provide an app that works. Every now and then it logs you out and does not recognize you and your password and does not let you in even when you change your password. Guys do not be cheap please provide us with Face recognition. You can find some music content that they claim they have, but actually they just have the cover and you cannot have access to their contents. I tried to email them several times and receive no response back. You create a playlist for yourself then it is gone after a few days for some unknown reasons. They do absolutely nothing to improve their apps.

The latest version has worked flawlessly for the last few days. I have streamed 7 or 8 albums with no problems. I’ve been an NML subscriber for three years or so but only through Safari on my laptop. The iOS app works now works fine. However, the last I checked the iPadOS version continues to have a hiccup at the beginning of each track. I will give it 5 stars when the iPadOS glitch is worked out.

This is an incredible database of music I access through my public library. It has lately (fall 2019) become unusable, crashing incessantly in the middle of tracks. I’ve tried playing albums “offline,” I’ve tried disabling background refresh. I just managed to play two whole albums in a row without incident and thought you’d fixed the problem—but no, here it is again. Crash crash crash. Please fix this portal to your service, Naxos!

This app always had issues but recently (Fall 2019) it has become basically unusable. You start playing a track and it will stop on its own at an arbitrary point, sometimes only a minute or two later, and rarely more than five minutes in. Nothing I’ve tried seems to make a difference, like keeping the focus on the app or leaving the screen on. Then you have to reopen the app and either play the track from the beginning or even find the album from scratch.

Not sure it’s the last iOS update, but what used to work doesn’t anymore. Are the files corrupt? Almost all or all the recordings will stop in the midst of a movement at some point. Do not pay for a suscription now.