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Comment by Gehinnn | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see modern software engineers dealing with classical music!

It would be amazing if spotify could put some more love into their gigantic collection of classical recordings. Their autoplay feature often changes the piece in between movements, which is a torture. Some database for navigating through all the works of a composer, sorted by significance would also be very helpful to discover new pieces.

I would also love to see more innovation in score management/recognition etc. Like seeing the score while you listen to a recording or being able to compare different recordings at a given bar. You could even teach music lessons if you can use it to easily compare home made recordings with professional ones.

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Check out ConcertMaster for Spotify and Concertino for Apple Music. They have pretty good database of classical music that acts as an overlay for Spotify/Apple Music, essentially fixing the tags for a lot of composers/works.

The data is also available separately at https://openopus.org/

Wow open opus is what I have been looking for for a long time! Thanks!

This is what I once tried to build, but stopped as I encountered too many unknowns: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/fxsg8s/disc...

If open opus could be extended with such kind of metadata, that would be incredibly valuable.

This is great. Anyone know of something similar for jazz? Being able to see the full personnel of recordings and explore based on that would be amazing (actually it would be cool for rock too).

Are you familiar with the Musicbrainz database? [1]

What features (if any) are missing that would make it more useful for you as a listener? I'm not affiliated with them but I'm interested in building apps in this area, to make art and music easier to explore and navigate

[1] https://musicbrainz.org

Nope haven't seen it. If the data is reasonably complete, it looks great.

I tried out ConcertMaster, and I really like the ability to see works organized by type. But the database seems very, very small? There's almost no baroque or renaissance music here beyond the big names like Bach, Biber, and Vivaldi, for example.

Are you familiar with Idagio (https://app.idagio.com/)? Superior to Spotify across every dimension for classical music.

It even has the recording comparison feature you are dreaming of!

That is very cool. Now I'm missing the feature to compare recordings at a given bar! And to see the score from imslp :D

edit: Just applied there for a job. I'm curious what they will say.

Awesome. If you'd received money for leads you'd earned your provision now ;)

Idagio looks pretty awesome. Do you know who's behind it?

My only complaint so far is that they claim that one of the reasons for creating Idagio is that the main streaming services are track/album-oriented, implying that Idagio does this better. But if I go to an Idagio album (here [1] is a random example), there are just tracks. If I view the same album at Apple Music, the album is nicely divided into works [2], and also annotates each track with the composer.

I do love the ability to browse by work and find matching recordings, though.

[1] https://app.idagio.com/albums/r-strauss-and-brahms-orchestra...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/d3sNrnc.jpg

I guess they have the metadata - if you click on the work [1], you get only the tracks that are part of it [2]. Idagio seems to be a company located in Berlin! [3]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/hAe8ZSk.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/EGkTwSD.png [3] https://about.idagio.com/jobs

Indeed. It's the in-album grouping that I was desiring, though. (By the way, I pasted the wrong link: This is the Schumann/Brahms album: https://app.idagio.com/albums/schumann-and-brahms-lieder.)

Link 1 should have been: https://app.idagio.com/albums/schumann-and-brahms-lieder.

Any idea how it compares to https://www.primephonic.com/ ?

I've come across this in the past that worked really well til the integration with spotify broke and I didn't try and fix it. https://getconcertmaster.com/

The worst is using free spotify and you get an ad between the third and fourth movements of Beethoven's fifth... So agonizing

Spotify overall would be hugely improved if we could just filter and navigate by labels, for electronic and particularly for Classical.

I'm pretty sure they even have the data somewhere anyway, there was definitely a "Here are your stats for [Duration of time]" thing with subgenres and similar.

You can at least search by label in Spotify, using "label:X" as a search term. Not perfect but it's better than nothing...

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