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Apple Music Classical

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Re: Apple Music Classical

#111

Post by tzs »

How is Apple Music playback on Amazon Echo devices? Does Apple have anything as nice as Spotify Connect?

My current setup is that I have an Echo Dot connected by the line out to my A/V receiver, with the microphone turned off. With Spotify Connect the Spotify on my computer or phone can tell the Spotify on the Dot to play a song, album, or playlist. The Spotify on the Dot then streams that music from Spotify. I can turn the computer or phone off and the music keeps playing. Spotify on my computer or phone will show what is playing on the Dot and let me control it.

This works really well. (In fact, it works way better than Amazon Music from my computer or phone works with the Dot. I just finished a 90 day free trial of Amazon Music and one of the reasons I did not subscribe was how poorly Amazon Music works with Echo devices. Spotify completely blows Amazon out of the water there).

What I really like with this is that once I start playback the computer or phone no longer needs to be involved.

I know that there is an Apple Music app for Echo that lets Apple Music be a source for Echo, so that I could say "Play Foo on Apple Music" and Alexa would use Apple Music do do that, but I don't want to choose my music by voice. I want to do the choosing on my Mac or phone/tablet.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#112

Post by dbbk »

_thisdot wrote: post #59
bouke wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because they're branding it as "Apple Music", not "Music (by) Apple".

On an iPhone the app is just called Music (similarly Google Maps is labelled just Maps on Android). This is exactly as weird as google maps domain being googlemaps.google.com

I've never seen googlemaps.google.com?

Re: Apple Music Classical

#113

Post by Aidevah »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #78
echelon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But unfortunately, this wont change the fact that the classical recording industry is dying and that the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies. Bet $100 that all classical music will be AI generated (synthesized and composed) in just three years. Supply side will be infinite.

Why would anyone want to listen to it then? what would be the point? The acoustic equivalent of a screensaver?

>Why would anyone want to listen to it then? what would be the point? The acoustic equivalent of a screensaver?

Isn't that exactly how music is consumed nowadays by most people? They put something when driving, cooking, doing homework, etc. It's used mainly for mood/focus and they're not exactly paying close attention to it the same way one would to a audiobook of, say, an abstract algebra textbook. Especially considering how cheap and easy it is to steam music nowadays. I suspect focused, attentive listening only makes up a small minority of the total streams.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#114

Post by rossy »

d3nj4l wrote: post #81
lynx23 wrote: post #80

192kHz/24 bit, what a wonderful piece of snakeoil... What do they actually record with this frequency, bats talking to each other about classical music?

You’re mixing up sampling rate/depth and sound frequency.

The idea that there's a noticeable benefit to having a sample rate higher than twice the highest frequency is the snake oil here. Many audiophiles seem to believe this but it's not supported by the mainstream understanding of digital signal processing.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#115

Post by chongli »

throwanem wrote: post #73
AlecSchueler wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always, though. You had church funding and then patronage from the state. Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment. Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present. Co…

There are a few composers I support on Patreon who also do their own production via extensive combinations of plugins and soundfonts in applications I've barely ever heard of before. The result is hard to distinguish from a human orchestra, save in the nature of the occasional errors, which are always of composition rather than execution. This would I think be a lot more common were it not such a niche interest. Even…

I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff

The stigma against video game music can’t go away soon enough! Composers are creating some really amazing stuff for video games and gamers themselves are an enormous audience for the wider classical music industry to draw upon.

To their credit, a lot of orchestras have recognized this and have been performing video game music for years. Along with film scores (a trend started by John Williams), video game music has breathed an incredible amount of new life into an industry that might otherwise be in far worse shape now.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#116

Post by bippingchip »

pasc1878 wrote: post #28
jen729w wrote: post #20

Err… downloaded on my iPad. It launches as a scaled iPhone app. You must be f’ing kidding me?

It does say it is iPhone only and in the FAQ "Classical fans who want to listen on their MacBook, iPad, or in their car can open Apple Music to enjoy the tracks, albums, and playlists they saved in Apple Music Classical, thanks to the shared music library." Which does not help me as I share from my mac - so hoiw do you do this?

Yes I ran into the same thing - It's disappointing, though maybe understandable as this is an iteration on the Primephonic app they acquired a while ago. And though I cannot find any reference to it anymore, if memory serves right, that was mobile only too?

I hope that over time Classical will make it onto the Mac as well. I listen to a lot of classical music while I work and it's more than a bit annoying that the play/volume controls on my Mac don't work...

Re: Apple Music Classical

#117

Post by pell »

nordsieck wrote: post #103
lelag wrote: post #24

Strange feelings looking at this... This is almost exactly the product I failed to get into YC with back in 2017... All the same ideas as far as the UX goes with one main difference: the business model. I wanted to apply the Steam business model where people would actually buy album again (and not tracks a la iTunes). The issue is that while it's nice to have a UX tailored for classical, this won't likely help the cl…

> I wanted to apply the Steam business model where people would actually buy album again (and not tracks a la iTunes). Could you expand on this a bit? I am very much a track oriented person. Why do you think it would be better to force/encourage people to buy albums?

I don't know what OP's business model looked like exactly. However, classical music is often composed and performed as full works, such as symphonies, operas, and concertos, rather than individual songs or tracks. These works are often intended to be listened to in their entirety and are structured in a way that builds upon and develops themes throughout the piece.

Another problem is that the way classical music is divided into tracks is sometimes not universal. For example, there are some recordings of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that are divided into five separate tracks (one for each movement) while others divide it into just two tracks (one for the first three movements and another for the final two movements).

While there are many modern music albums that were intended to be listened to as full albums (e.g. "The Wall", "American Idiot" or "To Pimp a Butterfly"), I guess the track-based listening experience just won over in that part of the music world. That said, people often also just listen to a single sonata, aria, etc. in classical music too, of course, instead of always going for the 2 hour experience.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#118

Post by wizofaus »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #106
johndill wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to disagree. Classical music would be the LAST thing AI could do well. Hard to but technique, nuance, opinion, interpretation, style and the greatest utterances of our troubled civilization into an algorithm. Pop, dance, rap, blaalads....maybe. Classical and Jazz? Never going to happen.

Lmao, classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music. Without any lyrics to generate its basically just generating some simple patterns in basic instruments. There’s no way you’d be able to tell.

> classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music

Uh, have you actually listened to any of it? At all?

There are some non-Western traditional types of music I'd agree can have a level of complexity not usually encountered within the Western classical or jazz genres, but it's fair to say all over forms of Western music are vastly simpler in terms of harmonic language, tonality, form/ structure, instrumentation etc. None of which I believe would make it harder for AIs to generate, as computers can manage complexity rather well. What I expect AIs to not be good at is to conjure a truly original and distinct sound world significantly different to anything that's come before, but that still captivates audiences. Which is arguably what the greatest human composers & musicians have generally achieved, in any genre.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#119

Post by ckolkey »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #106
johndill wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to disagree. Classical music would be the LAST thing AI could do well. Hard to but technique, nuance, opinion, interpretation, style and the greatest utterances of our troubled civilization into an algorithm. Pop, dance, rap, blaalads....maybe. Classical and Jazz? Never going to happen.

Lmao, classical and jazz are the two simplest forms of music. Without any lyrics to generate its basically just generating some simple patterns in basic instruments. There’s no way you’d be able to tell.

You.. you're joking, right?

Re: Apple Music Classical

#120

Post by tzs »

lynx23 wrote: post #97
highhedgehog wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that the audio is sampled at 192khz and each sample is 24bit, not that the audio is recorded with hardware capable of recording sounds up to 192KHz

I know about nyquest, do you? 192kHz sampling rate means the highest tone representable is 96kHz, which is roughly 80kHz more then what the average human can actually (still) perceive. For audio-postprocessing, I might be convinced that there is a benefit of raising the sampling frequency that high, but for pure hi-fi consumers? No way. This is snakeoil.

That's an unconvincing argument because the presence of ultrasonic sounds can affect human perception. It is just not perceptible via the exact same mechanism that ordinary sound is.

The argument you should be going with is that the speakers and headphones that people will be playing the music on doesn't do ultrasonic sound.

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