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Apple Music Classical

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Re: Apple Music Classical

#351

Post by iakov »

sonofhans wrote: post #344
disposition2 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just rose colored glasses but I want to say Rdio had support for things like this back in the early 2010s. I know it was the best music streaming service I've ever used for music discovery. I definitely recall it supporting things like music labels (i.e. Deutsche Grammophon) and want to say it got so granular that it provided the information (performers, conductors, etc) you are looking for. Alas, Rdio is…

Yes, I’ll join you in pouring one out for Rdio. I listened to, and paid for, Rdio every day for years until Spotify killed it. Rdio allowed users to fulfill simple goals — find music you know and listen to it; find new music and listen to it. The paths to those goals were simple and clear. Turns out it’s hard to make money that way. Thus why, I suppose, Spotify is a cornucopia of manipulative dark patterns.

I use spotify daily to listen to my playlists and find new music regularly. I have not noticed any dark patterns, apart from search on desktop being weird sometimes. What are they?

Re: Apple Music Classical

#352

Post by throw0101b »

mihaaly wrote: post #340
earthnail wrote: post #305

Oh my, 192kHz/24bit. One would expect Apple would not need snake oil to sell their product. To those not so familiar with audio DSP: 192kHz and 24bit make perfect sense if you intend to mangle the audio a LOT afterwards. At 192kHz, you can pitch shift your audio down by two octaves and still have frequency content in the entire CD spectrum. Very useful, and common, for movie effects. And 24bit, or better even 32bit,…

192kHz is overkill of the overkill, but 10bit, seriously?! That is 1024 levels for the whole dynamic range, you are cutting it down to its 64th fraction man! With classical music where it is not filled up to the level of clipping but silent parts contain plenty of details you really must be joking with 10 bits or perhaps rely on listening experience of rap with through the roof bass and inarticulate jabber, there eve…

> With classical music where it is not filled up to the level of clipping but silent parts contain plenty of details […]

And just because the music is silent doesn't mean the recording is: there's one album I have where there is a short rest in the musical work, but they recorded in a church in the country/rural area and seem to have have left the window(s) open, so during the musical stop you can hear birds chirping in the recording (if you have decent headphones).

Re: Apple Music Classical

#353

Post by deanCommie »

m348e912 wrote: post #350

>>Only a brand-new app — with specialized features and a beautiful interface designed for the genre — could remove the complexity and make classical music easily searchable, browsable, and accessible for beginners and experts alike. Just thinking out loud. Was there a need for a separate app music? Instead add a "classical mode" to the traditional apple music app that enables features for classical music lovers.

Companies ship org charts. It's just what they do.

But typically it's a benefit to customers - it means you get MORE features faster.

At the cost of inconsistency.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#354

Post by thewebcount »

ninkendo wrote: post #182
falcolas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. It’s perfectly acceptable to bounce off a book after five pages. Off a podcast with poor production quality. Off a song after the first measure. Tastes differ, so don’t feel bad if you dislike something the zeitgeist adores.

Back when scarcity was a thing, the act of powering through with media you didn’t initially like was one of the primary ways of maturing your taste and learning to like new things. Only consuming media which hooks you instantly is a good way to achieve the media equivalent of a sugar-only diet. I don’t have an answer for this to be honest, it’s just an observation.

That's certainly one way to look at it. I see it a little differently. With video games, for example, when I had to buy a game to see if I liked it, I'd mostly just buy the big hits that a lot of people liked or smaller games that got wide critical acclaim. But with a subscription gaming service, I can try out any game on the service without paying an additional fee, so I'm trying a wider range of games in genres I don't normally play. I've found some real gems I wouldn't have even considered previously if I'd had to buy them first to really get to know them.

The radio was like that before streaming services. Don't know if you like country music? Just pop on the country station when you're alone in your car and try it out. If it doesn't work out, switch to hip hop or classical, or alternative. Worst case, you wasted 5 minutes of your time while you were driving anyway. Best case, you have a new genre of music to explore!

That said, I'm don't have ADHD and am heavily skeptical of anything coming from big corps, so I already aggressively tune out most things, so maybe it's not that easy for others.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#355

Post by smoldesu »

biftek wrote: post #339
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?

A higher bit rate lets you digitally process audio without introducing artifacts. It's very common to record, mix, and master audio at 192/24 and even oversample well above 192k. It has nothing to do with snake oil or hearing things above 22k it's about not introducing aliasing and other digital artifacts, and on highly dynamic content like classical can definitely be heard in the audible spectrum.

Wouldn't you get more artifacts downsampling a 192k mix to AAC as opposed to just using an AAC-optimised file from the start?

Re: Apple Music Classical

#356

Post by BlueDingo »

iakov wrote: post #351
sonofhans wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I’ll join you in pouring one out for Rdio. I listened to, and paid for, Rdio every day for years until Spotify killed it. Rdio allowed users to fulfill simple goals — find music you know and listen to it; find new music and listen to it. The paths to those goals were simple and clear. Turns out it’s hard to make money that way. Thus why, I suppose, Spotify is a cornucopia of manipulative dark patterns.

I use spotify daily to listen to my playlists and find new music regularly. I have not noticed any dark patterns, apart from search on desktop being weird sometimes. What are they?

I only know of the upgrade splash screens where Dismiss is small and/or floating off of the brightly colored splash so it doesn't contrast and is harder to see. Exactly like Amazon Music.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#357

Post by methehack »

lifefeed wrote: post #226

I would love to see something like this for jazz, which has musicians constantly moving through groups and albums as musicians and composers and writers. Like take "Take Five", one of my favorites. It was written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with solos by Desmond on alto sax and Joe Morello on drums. Those are all fun pieces of information that I wish I could click through to see more of. Just like c…

Check out roon + quboz and/or tidal -- that's the audiophile route.

Roon is just meta-data and presentation. Quboz/Tidal hold the content. Roon's content and interface is fantastic compared to spotify and apple music. It uses third party content (wikipedia, reviews from tivo, maybe others) seemlessly. And it elevates the use of the album art. Also, it allows for album-centric approach to viewing/organizing/listening which I vastly prefer. Roon also allows deep linking. Like every album/track has a list of the people on it and you can see everything each of them has done. Same for composers/etc. Also, from each track, you can get to all the other recordings across all artists. Using this for the last month has really pointed out to me how crap apple and spotify are for discovery/learning/investigation.

Technically, this route is also superior because, as I understand it, roon tells the streamer + DAC, which may be way higher quality than the DAC in any apple device, to stream directly from TIDAL or QUBOZ. This yields higher quality because you skip the apple DAC and airplay, both of which lessen quality compared to what's possible with the other route. I'm sure the apple DACs are fine for what they are, but I'm also sure they're full of compromises. You can spend like 5K on a DAC alone.

I know audiophiles can really overdo it, but I have been using this combination for a month or so now and I think it's sooo much better. Music is way more like I remember it. It was confusing to me because spotify/apple music have everything and yet I found them very frustrating to use. My instinct was right -- they're crap products compared to what's possible. Your mileage may vary.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#358

Post by squeaky-clean »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #222
mbo wrote: post #173

> There’s no separate subscription for Apple Music Classical. It’s included at no extra cost with all Apple Music subscriptions except the Apple Music Voice Plan. Bit of a missed opportunity here to provide a cheaper subscription just for Classical. Apple could have captured Spotify users who would be willing to pay a small premium for a nicer classical UX, but would be unwilling to take out an additional full-priced…

Beyond pricing, what's their strategy here trying to unbundle music? Are they going to release a different music app for every genre? If it's just a classical app, does that mean I now have to use two apps to switch between music based on genre? What benefit is there other than slightly better UX which presumably could be bundled in an existing app.

You can still listen to classical in the regular music app, all of these tracks and albums are in the main app. But if you find a recording you really like and want to check out more stuff by that composer or the conductor, or the performers... Well conventional streaming app UI and search kind of sucks for that.

For example one of my most played artists on Apple music is "Various Artists" ;p

Re: Apple Music Classical

#359

Post by squeaky-clean »

dexterdog wrote: post #280
herodotus wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What benefit is there other than slightly better UX The way people (like me) listen to classical music is different from the way they listen to other kinds of music. For example, I might want to listen to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12. This has four movements, and I want the player to play from movement 1 through movement 4 once I touch the play button. This is very different from wanting to play (say) Price Ta…

> The way people (like me) listen to classical music is different from the way they listen to other kinds of music. For example, I might want to listen to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12. This has four movements, and I want the player to play from movement 1 through movement 4 once I touch the play button. This is very different from wanting to play (say) Price Tag by Jessie J which is one track. How is this any di…

It's more than a track but less than an album. If I just want to play Vivaldi's "Summer" that's typically done as 3 tracks for the 1 song. But the album it is on will almost always be the full 4 seasons suite, consisting of 4 songs / 12 movements (tracks). I can also see all the hundreds of different recordings of just those 3 movements in Summer.

Sure you could just go to the album and play track 4, and pause when track 6 finishes. But this makes that a little easier to play and easier to add to playlists and such.

There's also all the other metadata differences. Maybe I really like this composer, but apple music has it listed under the performing orchestra. Maybe I really like this conductor. This breaks all those out into different options.

Re: Apple Music Classical

#360

Post by fundad »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #25

This looks ok, but I can't be the only person suffering Content Fatigue. Between access to infinite music, infinite movies and TV, infinite gaming, and infinite news - and that's just leisure - I'm not sure how much time I have left for a finite life.

not parents
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