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This is 100% accurate. Classical music is just different from other music in too many ways to make them work well in the same UI. I have yet to see a UI that does it well, so I'm looking forward to seeing Apple's stab at it.

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 am not into classical music, but I think there are similarities for fans of jam bands especially the grateful dead. Ive never heard a group so passionate about specific versions of song depending on the date/location.

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.

Come to think of it, Phish or Grateful Dead live shows have some overlap, but that's more about recordings on different dates by the same artist, while classical adds different artists, or sometimes the same artist on different dates, or sometimes the same orchestra but a different conductor, or...

But yes, that's the closest I can think of, but I think it's a smaller niche even than classical music.

Jam bands may often have varying lineups / guests, which complicates things more than just different dates.

Anybody else tried the Stage+ app from Deutsche Grammophon?

https://www.stage-plus.com/

The player is kinda crappy. The content quality is quite good though, lossless and such. The selection is excellent.

Hey, thanks for the recommendation! This looks great.

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.

https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concerts

I've noticed there's a problem on streaming services where low quality artists basically spam the service with extremely low quality recordings of classical pieces. They often sound like they just got a midi file of the score and played it back through a piece of software. The scores for most classical music are public domain so there is nothing "wrong" about this but no one really wants to listen to low quality MIDI playback versus a human performance.

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.

Apple Music actually has a lot of human editors and curators controlling playlists and spotlighting featured music. I'm sure their classical service will be similar.

That's basically what made me switch. Apple has a huge advantage there, at least over Amazon.

That is true, but given that classical music probably has a much smaller audience to offset the cost of curation by humans, I wonder how the service will be profitable for Apple.

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 once asked Android Auto to play "act 2 from carmen" and it responded with an absolutely bizarre rendition of the Toreador Song that had been programmed into a MIDI in the voice of birds chirping. Just crazy. Sometimes I think the algorithm they use at YouTube Music optimizes for paying the least royalties.

> They often sound like they just got a midi file of the score and played it back through a piece of software.

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.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing at all.

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.

> This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.

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.

I like the idea of some sort of curation process but I’m much less interested in an algorithmic ranking and much more interested in _why_ a particular recording is favoured so that I can see whether it lines up with what I understand about the work.

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.

Do you have an accessible example for two different recordings of a composition that each shine in their own light?

A million examples, but I'll offer just one:

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.

That is a good example. You could also go even wilder and compare classical Bach interpretations with jazzy Bach interpretations.

There are truly so many variables, How many of each instrument in an orchestra, the orchestra's layout, the conductor, the recording, the acoustics of the physical location, etc...

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

Goldberg variations comes to mind. If you search for it on your music service you will without a doubt be presented with Glenn Gould famous interpretation from 1955 where he eccentrically hums you through. You can then listen other renditions and you will notice they are quite different (foreinstance Fazil Say or Lang Lang)

I happened to be listening to Fazil Say's variations when I read your comment. I can't recommend them highly enough; they're a delight.

Another example is orchestras that record historical pieces with period correct instruments that are intonated/tuned/tempered in a period correct way as those changed over the years.

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.

The appropriately-named "The Academy of Ancient Music" is a very approachable way to access such music recordings.

The main difference (to my untrained ear) is usually interpretation of tempo

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)

This video compilation is the great example how a simple 11 beats from the “rite of spring” can be interpreted.

>103 different versions of the same 11 notes for a total of 1,133 beats

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z-NqGMS8p-c

My favorite example of this is the Glenn Gould recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations. He has 2 famous recordings - one recorded in 1955, another in 1981. They are very different in tone.

I'm looking forward to this app in part because I think I can finally let go of keeping the Plex Player app on my phone almost exclusively for listening to the Glenn Gould SACD collection I ripped like a decade ago. Great recommendation, and I'm genuinely happy at the thought that this release could expose a lot more people to his work.

And then try Schiff or Dinnerstein to hear the same music in yet another way…

If it's like PrimePhonic, the classical streaming service Apple bought and converted into this, it has educational content that guides you towards some of the best recordings. The main interface is more about discovering and searching for certain recordings yourself, though.

Not quite what you're describing but it made me think of this annual countdown from this classical station https://www.wqxr.org/classical-countdown-2022/

People got a little nuts in the comment thread taking it very seriously.

From the screenshots, it looks like it does allow you to find different recordings of the same work with pointers to the most popular/esteemed.

> This is fantastic, classical music absolutely needs a dedicated interface since the organization by composer and multi-movement works is so different from popular music.

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.

> needs a dedicated interface

>> 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.

idagio

I don't manage a local collection anymore. I'm in streaming app hell like the rest of you, and I regret it.

It's not just about organizing, though -- it's about social discovery.

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.