Apple Music Classical 4+

Absolutely love the idea of this app as the classical music library has never really fit with the streaming service model, due to the endless numbers of ‘opuses’ and ‘works’. This is the first real attempt at trying to create an intuitive way to search for and listen to different recordings and compositions by a big player in the music industry, which is admirable but it doesn’t take long to quickly get lost in the endless menu dialogues, or where the app just freezes on you (I repeated the same action multiple times and every single time it crashed!).

That being said, PLEASE don’t give up on this app! It is such a good idea and just needs a bit of rethink in how it can be a truly intuitive way to navigate a huge collection of classical music. I’ve always thought that orchestral music wasn’t suited for MP3s, lossy compression because of the amount of information being lost and it 100% benefits from the lossless format! So many good ideas - just needs a bit more polish for basic functionality.

I like the idea of this app. Classical music is a different ballgame and in terms of library organisation relies on different categories and search terms etc. I can’t understand then why there’s so much overlap with my regular Apple Music library. Why is the entire Hamilton album in Apple Music Classical? Why is a Take That song? A Coldplay song? When I add a song to my library on Classical it clutters up my tracks on the regular app. Given that the Classical app is included in an Apple Music subscription it makes no sense why Apple can’t just direct all classical stuff over to the Classical app.

The way I would fix one aspect is by looking at playlists in the Apple Music library, take all the playlists where 95% of the tracks or higher are classical tracks and move them (not copy them) over to Apple Music Classical. Leave any playlists where one out of 10 tracks say is a classical piece where they are in Apple Music.

Right now we have the buzzard state of affairs where certain playlists are listed in Apple Music Classical or where one classical track is listed. So a playlist shows up with one track in it. This is completely bonkers.

It’s so unintuitive this app that I don’t use it.

Pretty good but the library function is amazingly bad. It only loads 20 library titles at a time which means endlessly scrolling through 20 titles then pausing while the next 20 load. Fine if you only have 19 titles saved to your library and they’re all Bach! I’ve saved a few hundred titles and scrolling through from Bach just as far as Mozart genuinely takes several minutes.

If that wasn’t bad enough… If you have the nerve to select a title from the library, click into it to have a look, then go back…guess what?! Yep, it sends you all the way back to the top of your library!! There’s something uniquely infuriating about working your way through your own library to, say, Mahler then being fired all the way back up to Bach when you decide that actually you’d rather listen to Mahler 9 than to Mahler 4.

The app isn’t all bad - there are in fact lots of things I prefer to every other classical streaming app - but the library function is so unbelievably bad it does need to be highlighted.