Had been looking forward to this as it seemed obvious to me that Apple had few, if any, classical music specialists advising them. The Apple Music Classical app seemed like an answer to an unspoken prayer.Sad to say, it isn’t. We still have erroneous titles, e.g., “On and Overgrown Path” instead of “…an Overgrown Path”. Worse though is that Apple does not seem to realise that a classical sonata or concerto or symphony is one complete work, telling a musical story. Apple tends to divide, say, a concerto, into bits and pieces (or what it calls “songs”), giving listeners one movement that it chooses to play as a “song.” This is very much like reading one chapter of a book and having to guess the rest of the story, or even like reading one page of a book. Most classical music lovers like listening to a COMPLETE sonata, concerto, symphony or fantasia. In other words, the entire story that a musician has composed and another musician has performed. The movements in an individual work are NOT “songs” unless describing people singing songs. I am quite deaf; Apple Music brings with it the wonderful Bluetooth which enables people like me to hear music again. I can no longer hear my CDs well enough to enjoy them. So, Apple it is. But it remains a great disappointment that Apple seems to have no staff member who knows that great Classical Works are not meant to be divided into “songs”, and who understands that we do not want bits and pieces of music - without context - given us to listen to. “Songs” can be relegated to pop music.

UPDATE: It’s now on iPad! Fantastic! Great for listening to hiRes recordings!This is a great app for discovering Classical recordings that were hitherto difficult to track down on Apple Music. It seems to me that this is a client app to basically just add this stuff to your Apple Music app. At least as for as being portable and travelling is concerned. You can’t use this app offline, but you can save your things to Apple Music for offline use… That needs some work. I would like to segregate my listening. The worst thing with Apple Music is when I put on shuffle for some contemporary music and I get a random bass trombone sonata movement added to my shuffle list… While I love that music I prefer to listen to it intentionally and in its correct context. This app should be the place for all my classical listening, and therefore should be fully functional. The only other thing I would say is that the lack of support for the iPad interface is atrocious. I use my iPad as a HighRes DAP to connect to an amp and headphones. It’s a great way to get my audiophile setup going. But the interface for the iPad makes this use case less than ideal. Surely being developed in house would make this an easy fix. I’m no developer, but I have watched WWDC for numerous years now and I believe the scaling is native to swift…. Not sure how an “in house” app could be so deficient on one of Apple’s own flagship devices.

Needs reliable gapless playback. Gaps between movements of a piece which is supposed to continue seamlessly are a bad listener experience. Fix this before anything else. The written order of conductor, ensemble, and soloists appears to be random, and even changes between movements of the same piece on the same recording. There’s no discernible pattern to whether an album name uses a composer’s full name or only their last name. I should be able to search within my list of saved albums in my library. Instead I can only sort by title, release date, or whether I recently added the album. Sorting by title isn’t great because an album title could start with either “Shostakovich” or “Dmitri Shostakovich”. And I can’t just look under Composers in my library, because that list isn’t sourced from albums I’ve saved, I have to add composers separately—and then the composers section shows ALL their works and recordings, not just those added to my library (which would be fine if there was a way to search within the saved albums).It would be great to be able to search and sort by record label. It is extremely unintuitive to add anything as a favourite recording (separate to an album or work). I’m glad the feature exists, but it’s hard to find and harder to use. Waiting for the iPad and Apple TV apps. Good things I’ve found so far:Searching by opus number is surprisingly functional and often links into an entry in “Works”. I didn’t know how badly I needed in my life the ability to browse works by instrument until I had it. Being able to see both popular artists and poplar works by instrument is incredible. I like that where someone has multiple roles (e.g. is a composer and a conductor and a musician) it lists them all in their name in the catalogues.

Is it just me or is this app getting worse. I’m now constantly running into issues like tracks, pieces or playlists not playing when I tap them but only in some sections of the app. Just now a playlist wouldn’t play from the browse section no. After what I tried. I had to add it to my library then play it from there. Then when I tried to AirPlay to. HomePod it just. Wouldn’t. Froze for a bit the. Showed it was playing but with no audio coming from the HomePod.This kind of nonsense along with missing features (offline listen, play queue management, or iPad app anyone?), slow and laggy performance, and just truly baffling UX design choices like splitting playlists in the my library into two seperate pages (mine and from Apple Music) forcing awkward navigation via ‘show all’ links and no playlist search across all playlist in my library, has me just going back to using the Apple Music app.