I hope the Apple Music Classical programmers are getting an earful from the Software Tools department. To release a first-party app that’s iPhone-only in 2023 is inexcusable. At WWDC we’ve been hearing for years how easy it is for developers to make their software work across iOS, iPadOS and macOS. When I opened Apple Music Classical on my iPad and got the little iPhone app screen I was incredulous. What an embarrassment for Apple.
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Does anyone know what Apple did with the expertise it acquired when it purchased Primephonic? Like many of you, I was stunned by the mediocrity of the tiny iPhone-only app in which marketing and glitz overwhelm the base Apple must have had by buying Primephonic. Or perhaps Apple just did that purchase to eliminate a competitor and trashed the expertise because Apple believes it knows more than anybody else. For me, I’ll stick with IDAGIO for classical music.
My guess is that Apple is limiting the rollout to one OS at a time to make sure each iteration works perfectly across the many countries they sell to around the globe. As discussed, a classical music database is a super duper mega undertaking. Spacing the rollout to each individual OS as well as in different languages, will enable any early corrections that might be necessary.
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You have a much more gracious take on this than I do. 
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I’m going to write an article this week about using a pair of HomePods. They sound great, and offer Dolby Atmos playback. However, you can get a good amplifier and bookshelf speakers for less.
Why wouldn’t you play the music from Apple Music Classical? Why do you want to move it to the Apple Music app?
Best,
Kirk
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A nuclear reaction would be better?
Ditto. Especially since I highly doubt “works perfectly across the globe” is something anybody these days would use to describe Apple’s software, or “services” for that matter. Well anybody outside of their propaganda department, of course.
Apple’s track record with buggy OS releases has historically been much better than Android’s
Though it’s not an OS, Spotify has a buggy historical record as well:
https://www.androidpolice.com/common-spotify-problems-fixes/
The concertmaster is still the conductor. That’s how music was played in Mozart’s time and earlier. It’s common these days with original performance practice to do that, though I’ve seen that even with modern instruments.
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This is both an edge case and a core problem. For this, you can filter by instrument, but there will be other examples, such as Liszt’s reductions of Wagner, etc.
Where will your article appear? Will you cover Apple (and 3rd party) options for obtaining the best sound?
For example, I have one 1st gen HomePod and two HomePod Mini’s. I’ll have to look at their repetitive specs, but I think the HomePod 2’s added one or more of the electronic goodies not prsent on the originals, so that I probably would NOT want to go out and buy just one more HomePod 2 to pair with my first one. I’m also not sure about sending the sound to my Apple TV 4K-linked LG Soundbar, but I’ll investigate that as well (actually, the Soundbar is linked to the TV itself via an HDMI 2.1 ARC port, so that might not be possible.
As for why I don’t just want to “play” my music from Apple Music Classical, I’d certainly love to do that, but my understanding is that I cannot if I’m offline; e.g., flying in the US. I’m almost always on UA, and I rarely fork over their price for on board Wi-Fi. Also complicating that experience is the choice of sound output, but that’s more a matter of wrestling AirPods Pro with relatively limited battery life out from my buried laptop backpack (buried in front of my spouse’s 75 pound service dog, who doesn’t mind, but when we’re sharing a 3-seat space with a non-dog-lover, it’s at least an inconvenience.
I guess I should ask whether I’m wrong about offline playback; e.g., if I’ve put a work into a PlayList, can I stream it wirelessly to my hearing aids or my AirPods Pro WITHOUT downloading it into Apple Music first?
Looking forward to that article.
My friend was inquiring more about all the grand bendings of the knees, almost-leaps on the podium, and of course the aerobic wavings of the unadorned and baton-enhanced arms.
True Story (hope I haven’t told it here before). At an MTT led SF Symphony concert a few years ago, I was seated in front-row orchestra (NOT the best place to hear the music, but a great place to watch the musicians, particularly if there’s a soloist). I was glancing at my program when suddenly something white whizzed by me at knee level and struck the person immediately to my right. It was MTT’s baton, confirmed by Tilson-Thomas finishing the piece sans baton AND, of course the “evidence” retrieved by the guy next to me. The piece being performed was just before intermission, and before he left the stage the cellist seated closest to us leaned over and said to my seat-mate “keep it; he’s got a hundred of them.” We then joked a bit about whether, if I was going to sit in the same location in the future, I should come wearing a first-baseman’s mitt.
I’m neither an accurate nor an encyclopedic Apple historian, but what I’ve read tells me this is NOT an example of Apple playing “catch and kill.” For example, it’s fairly widely reported that they HIRED a substantial number of Primephonic’s developers. I’m hopeful it’s more an example of caution, but I guess it’s also possible that there could be licensing or even Apple corporate income restrictions. For example, someone like Gilbert Kaplan might choose to download EVERY recording of EVERY Mahler composition EVER recorded, and although HE could easily afford to do so, perhaps Apple is happier with people NOT archiving individual recordings without PAYING for each one of them.
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I play in an amateur orchestra. After his baton went flying during a rehearsal, our conductor said a lot of conductors keep a spare baton on the first viola’s stand behind their music.
I think you can attribute this to three things:
- The conductor is trying to express an extreme emotional surge in the music
- The conductor is really into the music and got carried away
- Showmanship. Just like a rock guitarist performing his acrobatics on stage.
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The WSJ had an article about Apple Music Classical this morning that confirms this.
If you have Apple News+, here is a link: Apple Wants to Solve One of Music’s Biggest Problems
If not, some key quotes:
Instead, Apple studied the market for classical-only products and orchestrated a takeover of Primephonic, a startup based in Amsterdam with a few dozen employees. As conservatory-trained musicians fluent in code, they were uniquely qualified for this line of infrastructural work.
“What we have done over the years is design and build a classical-music database that consists of every data attribute of all composed and recorded work,” said Primephonic co-founder Veronica Neo, who now leads Apple Music Classical’s data operations.
Apple acquired Primephonic for an undisclosed price in 2021 and inherited that precious metadata. Now it is the engine behind Apple Music Classical, which comes included with an Apple Music subscription.
Mr. [Jonathan] Gruber, [the head of Apple Music’s classical], says he’s confident that Apple Music Classical will improve with time: “The search for perfection in classical music is the longest piece of string imaginable. This is just the beginning.”
(Just a parenthetical that it’s weird that Apple’s head of Classical is named Jonathan Gruber, a name so close to the John Gruber of Daring Fireball.)
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If you are offline, you will need to download to Apple Music. It’s quite simple to download a playlist in the Apple Music app; this is the way that you can create a playlist in Classical, switch to Apple Music, make the playlist available offline (i.e., open the Playlist, tap the downward-facing arrow at the top-right, or tap the three-dots-in-a-circle icon to the right of it and tap “Download”), and then play it offline.
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I’m a bit late to this conversation, but am I right that the only connection between the Apple Classical Music app (ACMA) and the Apple Music app (AMA) is that you can use the former to add albums to the latter? If you add music to your AMA library using ACMA, the metadata is just as spotty as it was before in the AMA, and if I modify the metadata in the AMA after adding something, it makes absolutely no difference to the metadata shown in the ACMA. So the ACMA is purely a search engine and streaming service for music in Apple-hosted databases and has nothing to do with the user’s current AMA library, except when adding albums to it. In some ways, this is a relief, because it means any changes I have made to my own library’s metadata will not be overwritten. ACMA just gives me a way to search for new recordings.