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Comment by minusf | Hacker News Reader

yes, based on the current primephonic one. apple can't make a good music app if its life depended on it.

I’m also a Primephonic subscriber. Been using it everyday for the past 8 months. Let’s be honest, their mobile app sucks. I’m using iOS but willing to bet on their Android app sucking equally.

That said, I’m paying them for the giant catalog, good curation, and a dedicated streaming service just for the classical genre. Realistically I think these will stay with Apple’s acquisition. So in the long term I’ll probably be happy.

On the other hand, their decision to shut down the app before the alternative is launched is disappointing and unacceptable.

i think as far as streaming / discovery apps go primephonic was ok, esp considering their probably miniscule dev team. bandcamp is also just so-so.

but both of them are head and shoulders above any apple made media player. beggars belief how the most rich company of the world can't put together even a mediocre music app on their own vertically controlled OS/hw product.

Presumably this was an acqui-hire. The people who wrote the Primephonic app would then be expected to write the one for Apple, likely based on their original codebase.

I remember when Apple bought SoundJam MP [1] and turned it into iTunes (and later renamed Music) so this is a familiar story. Apple has a chance at a fresh start with this one. I’m willing to give them a shot at it. If they mess it up I can always cancel the sub.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP

Could also have been a purchase for their licensing or metadata. It sounds like Primephonic has put a lot of work into all of that, and if Apple wants to get into classical then it'd make sense to throw a tiny-by-their-standards amount of money at a known-good metadata set and accompanying licenses for the music.

(Though I agree, it'd be kind of silly for them to not let the people they've acqui-hired keep on working on the "new" app in their domain.)

100% this.

i also think this is the case, as the user base must be tiny still (esp when looking at the comments here, even classical music fans didn't know about it. i found it through the "inside the score" youtube channel)

The existing iOS app is programmed by approx < 2 devs. They have an Android app which Apple will quickly shut down. The infra can be run by < 2 ops too.

I predict most of the dev team will be looking for a new gig soon... shame as they were a great bunch!

>They have an Android app which Apple will quickly shut down.

Why would they do that? Apple Music and AppleTV are both available on Android.

And the original apple music app was based on Beats Music as well! I‘ve heard the theory that they bought Beats for that, and the music industry contacts, which seems wild, but maybe?

People say this, but I've never really been vexed by the apps they provide until relatively recently. I'd like the interface to be speedier, for example.

The biggest gripe that I've understood from other people is around classical metadata, which I agree iTunes and Apple Music have done a bad job with, just like most every other service that doesn't focus on classical. I'm not a big consumer of classical, so it doesn't bother me very much, but I can see how it would be a BIG deal for people who listen to exclusively or mostly classical recordings.

OTOH, I'm encouraged that there exist niche services that focus on the classical market. I hadn't heard of this one, but in one of my periodic attempts to Listen To More Classical I had a subscription to Idagio for a while, and found it generally pretty great.

I don't think I'd agree with that dire an appraisal. iTunes was a good music app for a fair number of years, particularly on the Mac. It started to lose its way as it was asked to do more and more things, but I don't really think it fell off the cliff until they started integrating Beats Music into it. (IIRC, a lot of Apple Music's crazier UX ideas were present in some form in the pre-Apple Beats service, and subsequent iterations have just been different flavors of crazy. The metadata handling/matching, which has come up in this thread given how important that is for classical music, also got a lot worse post-Beats.)

Personally, I hope the Primephonic developers don't just develop a new classical app for Apple, I hope they work on the Music app, too.

In the beginning, iTunes never worked well once you had 10k+ songs. The user flows weren't designed to navigate large libraries, and it also slowed to a crawl.

And it always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.

The three pane view was pretty good for my large-ish library (~15k songs) and I didn’t have stability issues. But I wasn‘t there in the beginning. I guess it had at least a good stretch somewhere in the middle.

My library was never that big, but I knew people who had ones at least that size and didn't have any complaints, although given your last sentence it may be relevant to note they were all Mac users. The three-column browser view seemed to work very well for "drilling down" in collections, at least for me. (That browser's actually still in Music, even though it's unnecessarily hidden under the Songs view.)

> It always felt like straight up malware on Windows with all the QuickTime update prompts.

I'm not positive QuickTime was the source of an awful lot of Windows iTunes' badness, but I have strong suspicions. :)

swinsian is what itunes should have been from the start. after it became the homescreen for all the i-devices it never had a chance to be a usable music player...

they can, they just haven't since the native Music app in iOS 6. but in the streaming era, yeah, you might be right.

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