Apple launches its new classical music streaming app for pre-order
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But I wonder if it will help with finding which 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 "what's your favorite performance of..." and quickly find that there are 1 or 2 or 3 versions widely considered the best.
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's a lot of research to do otherwise.
And some people might think it can't matter that much, how different could they really be? But it'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 makes sense and it becomes your favorite.
When you search for a given piece of classical music you have to wade through all this low quality stuff.
It would be great if Apple Music finds a way to combat that. I recently switched from Amazon to Apple, Apple generally seems to have better control of the catalog so maybe it's less of a problem there.
My guess (which could be wildly off base) is that classical music is probably producing material in a much slower pace than pop music, so if the current catalog is curated once, updates will be incremental. So, given enough time, the service will eventually be profitable. And Apple can take on the task because they have deep enough pockets to not worry about recouping the cost of initial curation ASAP.
I'd say it's more than likely they did play the piece themselves, just it's often done by individual piano players that don't really know how to record piano digitally effectively. They're pianists, not sound engineers, after all. Often you'll find recordings of the default piano patch built into their digital pianos, or you'll see them using low quality VSTs or good ones that they simply don't know how to get the best results out of.
Hell, even if they're recording a real piano, they often don't have the best spaces, the best equipment, or even really know what they're doing. There's a lot of bad recordings done in good spaces as well.
A sort of glimpse into recording piano from a wonderful pianist, Nahre Sol, can be found on her youtube channel [1]. It's really hard to get right, even if you're an excellent pianist because ultimately, recording engineering is an entirely different field of expertise.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzSef7k-BKs
As far as filtering out the low quality stuff... is there even a reasonable way to do that? It seems wholly subjective. You could probably create a filter for recording labels that are known to put out good classical music recordings like Deutsche Grammophon and the like if you only want professionally recorded music.
There were low rent artists that had seemingly recorded every single famous classical piece. Not just piano pieces but all kinds of stuff.
They pop up in search results, but then you listen to it and you can tell it's not a cello, it's a keyboard or midi sequencer with a cello sound.
With a good keyboard and a human playing it you get the human nuance. That's not what a lot of these were.
Generally you can't go wrong with Deutsche Grammophon, or Hyperion, or even Telarc, but there sure are some stinkers out there, labels just trying to have a large catalog of any quality. And sometimes even a popular recording just doesn't work for me as well as a lesser-known recording, because personal taste can be strange.
I feel UI designers could make something work but its such a niche group of people its hard to spend resources designing and maintaining a catalog of recordings of different versions of the same song.
But yes, that's the closest I can think of, but I think it's a smaller niche even than classical music.
The player is kinda crappy. The content quality is quite good though, lossless and such. The selection is excellent.
I can endorse the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall, which is a very well made app and also streams in 4k/lossless/atmos too - Berlin Phil performances only, though. It's essentially a remote seasonal membership to the symphony. It looks like Stage+ has a wider range of performances, which is appealing, although it's very fun to watch evening concerts live from Germany almost any day of the week at 11am Pacific.
Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement.
Slow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbTVZMJ9Z2I
Faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrqBw4eELOM
Same could be said for compositions recorded on different instruments. Moonlight Sonata doesn't have to be played on piano. There are lots of recordings of it on other instruments.
Take for example, Stokowski doing Clair de Lune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMvIy1HO3UY vs Stanley Black: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zxpbwedpo4
Then again, you can even take a different recording of Stokowski doing Clair de Lune, and get a different experience still - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMjfPPMKK0
Look up Well Temperament versus Equal Temperament, etc..
These kinds of changes can make things sound quite different than a modern interpretation on modern instruments setup in a modern way.
Take Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata Op. 19, 2nd movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT9qe_euX8g (Sheku & Isata)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fZwD-Jq554 (Ax & Yo Yo Ma)
>103 different versions of the same 11 notes for a total of 1,133 beats
People got a little nuts in the comment thread taking it very seriously.
So this is true for how people organize popular music, but I can't help but think the classical music model is better and even pop music fans might benefit from having an information model for their music that is more in line with how classical music is organized.
Pop music seems to short-shrift the songwriters and other people who work in the background (at least when it comes to credit, if not always money). And some live-music focused acts, like jam bands, would probably seriously benefit from tracking performances in the same way. I know Phish fans, for example, usually end up tracking their favorite recordings, performances, and dates by filename in similar ways to classical music fans. And the models used by standard music and streaming applications don't fit them very well either.
It really doesn't. It was easy enough to organize music by the correct metadata in a local collection on Amarok 15 years ago. ID3 already supports all of the requisite metadata. You just need an app that is flexible and supports a 'now playing queue' by default and offers multiple views into your collection instead of the watered down garbage you get with streaming music apps today.
The only reason you'd think this is because most streaming apps today have a UI that is an even worse iteration of a very old version of iTunes, where you have to manually create a playlist in a cumbersome fashion in order to have any real control over what you're playing.
>> It really doesn't... You just need an app that is flexible
Do you have a suggestion about an app that doesn't suck for classical music? I'm aware that metadata fields exist, but that doesn't help with playback, which is why the original comment mentioned a dedicated interface.
It's about having a "current top composers" next to "current top artists".
It's about "current top songs" not having all 4 movements of a single work listed as separate songs. It's about the radio feature not randomly dropping you into the 17th track of an opera (with exceptions for certain arias).
It's about "people who listen to this composer also listen to..." along side "people who listen to this artist also listen to...".
But even organization was never fully solved in ID3, because it doesn't support multiple artists on a track (or multiple composers) in any standardized way. It's already a problem in popular music, but even worse in classical when both a conductor and a soloist and an orchestra are performing. ID3 doesn't have any way to group movements of a work together either -- you have to smush work and movement together in the title field.
The example I raise is the hundreds of recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin. An algorithmic ranking would likely put Hilary Hahn’s recordings near the top. But I find her approach very “direct”, metrical, and “in the string.” Christian Tetzlaff has a more “Baroque” reading. As a listener, I would want to know that. But this is probably too much to ask. I was happy enough when Apple started recognizing multi-movement works. Now if they stop calling everything a “song” I’ll be ecstatic.
I can't hide the non-streaming parts I'll never use, but sometimes search keeps directing me to it.
And that's when searching itself isn'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.
(Used to listen to NPR regularly, but in the last few years my local station has become absolutely intolerable)
You should contact your local station and let them know your views.
I can only hope that they won'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
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's much more random - search for Beethoven and you get a lot of "Beethoven for Relaxation" and a lot of recordings that would be no one's first choice - while something as essential as Karajan's recording of the 9 symphonies is pushed waaaay down in the results
"Available worldwide where Apple Music is offered, excluding China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Is it a rights issue?
The article mentions that Android app is also coming, any guesses for Windows (or Linux...) desktop clients?
What would kill KDFC would be Apple putting up a really good streaming station for classical.
up to. And down to ? 0 bps ?
It is often a way for companies (or headlines) to seem to be claiming something without actually committing to anything.
I think it's pretty clear Apple is making "192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless" distribution and listening available, but obviously it's up to labels and artists to supply actual recordings at that level. And many can't, simply because it wasn't mastered at that level, or wasn't even recorded at it.
Maybe this will be useful for others and you can continue to do without this.