NML 4+

For classical music, it’s tough to beat the sheer breadth and depth of the Naxos Music Library. The app’s interface for browsing and listening is not on par with the best commercial apps, but it’s serviceable and has allowed me to find both old favorites and some new treasures in the classical realm. My biggest complaint is the app’s odd fixation on “playlists” (consisting of individual tracks) as the primary mechanism for saving and organizing pieces i want to listen to again later. While the app is excellent at highlighting new and featured albums, about the only way to save albums as albums for future listening is to designate them as “favorites.” This is a welcome feature, as far as it goes, but it puts all favorites in one long list (with newest selections at the top) and I would really like a way to organize my favorite albums under named (by me) categories, whether called playlists or themes or folders. I also wish the app could play back tracks from my favorites list randomly, turning my ever-expanding favorites list into my own personal classical station.

As others have commented, the interface could use improvement, but I love the breadth and selection. A huge plus is that you can (temporarily) download for offline listening, great for walking around or taking in the car, but the big DOWNSIDE to this is that this app logs you out at the drop of a hat. Often I load up an album to listen to when not on wifi, only to find that when I want to listen to those tracks, the app wants me to log in again, which I can’t do without turning the app’s cell data on, which kind of defeats the whole thing. Also, who wants to deal with being in “login purgatory” every time you leave the house? Another annoyance is that, even on iPads, the app only appears in “portrait” orientation, which is super annoying whenever you are using the iPad in a keyboard case that works only in landscape mode. Would love to see a couple changes to the interface, as the music selection is fantastic.

I absolutely love using Naxos! It is such a great resource. However, it is really frustrating that when you pause a piece and change to a different app, the app refreshes and you lose not only where you were in the piece, but also end up back at the home page! I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have to get back to the Album and then start the whole piece from the beginning. I really hope that Naxos improves the app soon.