Apple Music Classical 4+

I’m a classical musician and listener as well as iOS app developer who loves Apple so this app seemed too good to be true for me, and unfortunately it isn’t true.

It’s close, and I like being able to look through recordings of a specific work and save works as a whole, and mostly I just like the huge library and high quality audio. But there are many issues:

1. If you go to the work page for Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, the list of tracks don’t have the violinist in the name ANYWHERE. sometimes it even has a cellist because there is also a cello concerto on the album. Violinist needs to be first, then conductor/orchestra.

2. You can’t share individual tracks, only full recordings. Makes it hard to share with friends.

3. (This is a big one for me) In the Library section, you lose the big album tiles and the “recently added” section that Apple Music has. I really want that back, it helps me look through for what I want to listen to. You also can’t edit the list of sections, while you can on Apple Music.

Overall the first point disappointed me because that should be the whole benefit of a specifically classical music app, and the third point disappointed me because it’s not as good as Apple Music. I also really want a Mac app. I hope that this app improves, and I’m giving it 4 stars rather than lower because I do think it has potential and I want to see it grow into itself.

This app’s interface is very pleasing. The ability to search for pieces under a composer yields more results than if I were to be looking under a general search in regular Apple Music, which I really appreciate. I like how playlists organize pieces under composer name. The music suggestions they give may be basic, but that is mostly irrelevant. This app is much better for finding classical pieces than regular Apple Music. However, that only extends to finding. When I try to listen to the music that I put in playlists, this is where I get most of my problems. Organizing and editing playlists makes the app crash. Pressing play on a piece will actually cause the app to play a completely different piece further up in the playlist. The pieces only play in the order you set them to in the playlist. There is no shuffle option. There is also no app in Apple Car Play to control the playing of music while driving. All these aspects force me to use regular Apple Music when actually listening to music. However, I would like to use this app more often. If the glitching when pressing play was fixed, and the addition of a shuffle button was added, I would be much more happy. It would also be neat if an Apple Music Classical app were added to Apple Car Play.

Good in concept, except, there are some concerns, in an ever expanding online social aspect: 1) the lack of forum, post, or chat capability, and 2) not having some linkage to places such as The Met or other venues to provide updates of Classical Concerts that will be soon / in the coming months. I gauge Classical Music (really extends to all forms) as something social going, in the end. Separating into this set and “stand alone” app could in fact become a trend, with more offshoots (yes, this is more than theory, given automatons) of separate *geared mainly for such music lovers / concert goers* apps will develop. Congrats for creating such an app, even though is preliminary. Classical Music can really only really be enjoyed, continued, and have dialogue when having that in person concert going occurring, and then, since the original Dot Com times with MySpace and Facebook did happen and so on, the sense of online community for electronic communication bridging. And while I am doing what best possible to avoid some dubious concerns on why and how this app came to be, I think that this being offered does allow for some enhancements in the long run for ALL that are musically talented, hope for their sounds &or voices to be heard, whether all together and varied &Or each on their own, and on, and on, and on.