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Comment by keehun | Hacker News Reader

If you primarily listen to classical music, Apple's new Classical Music app (part of its Music subscription) is *fantastic*.

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Always nice to see Apple Music Classical mentioned on here. I was one of the lead engineers building things before the acquisition and to my knowledge they still use tooling I built around automation of audio ingestion. Streaming music was a fascinating industry to work in

What's not fantastic is apple's lock down of their ecosystem. I'm not paying for some lacking android app by Apple.

anecdotal, I have the apple family plan and my partner has no problems with the apple music app on her android—we’ve been on it for a couple years.

i’ve used her phone to control music on long car trips, if there are differences i haven’t noticed. again, anecdotal.

The screenshots in the Play Store make it seem like the same app I see in iOS.

I was using Apple Classical happily for ~1 month, then it stopped working. It would load all the metadata and let me browse around but when trying to play a song it wouldn't progress.

I restarted my phone, reinstalled the app, went through several iterations of iOS updating, the problem never went away. No other app, including Spotify, has this issue on my phone. After a month of paying for Apple Music without Classical working I shrugged and unsubscribed. Big loss for me, and for them, since I am exactly their target audience with Apple Classical.

FYI, you can contact Apple technical support pretty easily. I have been able to talk to a real person quickly a few times over the years.

https://support.apple.com/contact

Does any other brand have something similar to Apple's support? I was kinda surprised to see that you could get called back as easily as I did. Or that their stores could quickly fix e.g. a bricked bootloader. The Windows/Android devices I had before had nothing like that.

I don't know, but it's definitely keeping me on board. I don't even call generally, I just text.

Also not fantastic, how Apple handles multiple devices. I forgot how they call it, but registering new devices is a pain, especially if you have multiple Macbooks, iPads, iPhone, there’s an edge case where you have to wait 90 days before it starts streaming to your brand new iPhone. You better reach out to their support, where they never acknowledge the issue but always fix it in 5 minutes.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250348779

The feature I miss that spotify has is being able to control music playing on my desktop from my phone or vice versa

Yeah, Apple has a remote app but you need to be on the same local network and connect to the remote library and then can't add stuff from Apple Music. It all feels so antiquated and inelegant.

Some people are complaining about Spotify UI/UX but at least they provide a lot of features and it works pretty well most of the time. I find the app more responsive and just overall better has a streaming player.

I subscribed to apple music for 5 years but then I just switched back to Spotify this year. It is just better.

That's the thing I loved most about Spotify. Unfortunately their "radio" sucks. It generates a 1 time playlist of 50 songs. Pandora has the shittiest interfaces ever, but it does a damn good job DJing for me. Most of the time, I just want to turn it on, pick a genre and let it go. I don't want to listen to the same 50 songs over and over in the same order.

I am quite steeped in the Apple ecosystem, but Apple's crude syncing behaviors and runaway AMPLibraryAgent bugs/invasiveness, has me quarantining Apple media software. Use of Spotify does not mangle my private music library.

Really? I didn't know Apple has a dedicated streaming app for classical now. Will check it out. Thanks

another nice option is Qobuz, the sound quality is good for the newer releases.

The UI was one step below Spotify or Apple the last time I tried it though.

It's noticeable that they're working with a much much smaller team than their competitors, and they occasionally roll out new bugs. On the other hand, they seem really dedicated and listen to the users. I've switched to Qobuz about five years ago and while I've had the occasional issue, I don't plan to move away from it. I usually get a personal reply to my bug reports (usually from the same guy -> small team! :D) and that tends to make me much more willing to support a company.

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