Apple Music Classical 4+

Ok it’s just day 1, but I’m a bit underwhelmed! It certainly looks good and some nice features (eg saving favourite works and recordings is easy and intuitive). Also being able to browse in so many different ways. But, and this took me by surprise, the album metadata for the few albums I checked is terrible, very messy and inconsistent. On two of the albums I looked at the tracks were better displayed by composer,work,movement in the ordinary Music app! Also you can’t download to the app, you need to go back to the Music app to do that so if our and about that’s the only option. Also if you are with the service for any length of time you are going to have a lot of albums saved to your library - I was really hoping they may have solved browsing this (maybe even a bit at to group my albums together) but this section is not even searchable and the filters are basic. And the iPad version was just the iPhone version - looks terrible. So iPhone only just now. I’ll maybe come back to Apple Music in a few months to see if things improve.

If Apple want to see a classical music app done way better they should have a look at Presto Music (new also but much, much better!).

This is an apple piece of software made to just work on Apple devices. As much as I love Apple, I think this is a fail. Was so looking forward to this but there are a few key features that are missing and I feel it was rushed out the door given these are key components of todays Apple echosystem. There appears to be no native iPad app… looks terrible on an iPad. Also there is no CarPlay feature, which is disappointing. Whilst I love the enhanced search facility tailored for classical, I would have preferred this to have been integrated into a classical tab, much in the same way iTunes used to work having pod casts, music, audiobooks, books, movies and to shows in the one place back in the day. Hopefully it will improve over time… but for now I’m on the fence.

This is a wonderful app for classical music lovers. I think the work and composer descriptions are great; well written and informative. I love the search function and the ability to save works to listen to multiple recordings of the same piece. Playlists by mood are also good but could do with some additional.

By far the largest drawback however is a mystery no music streaming app has cracked, and that’s the inclusion of opera libretti. What’s the point of discovering new operas (which is easy in this app) if you can’t follow along with the sung text and understand what is being sung? The ability to have one line of text appear at a time as you listen is surely possible because this is a smartphone, as is the ability to click into a section of the app that has the full text, or, at a minimum, download a PDF! Please think about this - be the first streaming app to do classical music (and opera!) full justice!