What makes listening to anything other than entire albums (radio, streaming, etc) unpleasant for me is the volume settings.
Most people listen to classical way too quietly. Most classical music has a very wide dynamic range. Your volume should be adjusted so that the very quietest parts are loud enough to hear every subtlety and so that the loudest parts shake your bones.
A single trumpet playing at full volume is loud enough to cause hearing damage. An orchestra has several of them, along with 50+ other instruments.
Loud orchestras are loud enough that freaking cannons do not necessarily overpower them.
So next time you're listening to classical music (or jazz), crank it up, and discover how much more you enjoy it.
Unfortunately, you'll ruin streaming and radio, though. They're often compressed, ruining that huge dynamic range. Each piece will have a different level, so you'll constantly be playing with your volume knob to get it set correctly. Which is really hard if you've never heard the piece before -- is it supposed to be loud or quiet?
And if you're listening to the radio with the volume set correctly, the announcer will start screaming at you. I love the CBC's Julie Nesrallah's voice, but I can't listen to her program because they have her voice turned up way too loud. If they turned it down the program would be much more enjoyable, and people would enjoy the music more because they'd turn their radio up to hear her properly.
Unfortunately it's not practical to do this for most people who have neighbours. I don't want to hear your classical music polluting my sound-space as much as I would some Techno or Heavy Rock at full volume (both of which are also more enjoyable at loud volumes).
And if you're listening in a car, then digital compression is the least of your audio problems.
Funny, I've wished for some kind of built-in compressor (as in the audio dynamics effect) for car listening - when dealing with road noise, city noise, treadmill noise, etc., I'd like to be able to turn up the volume without getting my ears blown out by the brass.
They're simply not built for it. Most streaming music services are built for people that want to listen to deadmau5, g-funk or top 40 while they put on their party dresses and pre-drink. A lot of us also use them to stream random tracks while we work: stuff with no lyrics, etc.
But a bespoke solution for streaming classical music should ideally have metadata fields for all those things: conductor, soloists, orchestra, recording venue, date, etc. etc.
I'd be willing to bet that internally most of those services are using nothing more sophisticated than the id3 tags I remember mucking with in winamp back when Napster was still a thing.
Never had issues listening to classical music on Spotify, on Ultra the sound quality isn't an issue, neither is finding what exactly you wan't since you can find specific performances by an orchestra or even a specific conductor.
This is actually only half the problem. Classical music is one of the genres where the profit-sharing model doesn't work very well. Spotify pay out every time a track is listened to (IIRC, this is triggered when you're 30s into the track). This works well for pop music, where the songs are short and they are listened to many times by the typical user. It works less well when the "songs" are 45 minutes long and typically only listened to once (famous works are recorded by multiple orchestras and listeners are likely to check out several and perhaps only ever return to their favorite interpretation).
This means that for many it's still more profitable to sell a small amount of CDs than to be on spotify.
I suspect this will change over the years because there's now a very large overlap between those that still listen to CDs, don't use spotify, and listen to classical music.
> It works less well when the "songs" are 45 minutes long
The pieces on streaming services (just like CDs) are not 45 minutes long, though. They're separated into movements that are typically between 4 and 10 minutes long. So, while you could listen to all of the Rite of Spring if you want for its entire 40 minute runtime (and I do a lot, as it's my favorite orchestral work), you usually don't. You might listen to only the Introduction to The Sacrifice, which is only about 4-5 minutes.
Bad metadata is the plague of the current long-tail world of Internet commerce and services. Classical music is a fantastic example, as is map data, online shopping, and pretty much everything else on the Internet.
The fact is that good metadata requires human verification and editing, and editors are the last thing any Internet company wants to spend money on.
Strangely, I find that most of my classical music is streamed acceptably (not perfectly, but good enough).
Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream-able audio.
Why can't we get canonical track timing for albums (down to the sample) and base the playlists accurately off them?
Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something terribly wrong? I've come across this problem on iTunes, WMP, Spotify, VLC, Google Music, Soundcloud and pretty much any other digital audio player out there that isn't designed for production (Traktor, Serato, DAWs). The fact that Traktor and Serato get this perfectly right hints that the "consumer" products just don't really care about this problem.
Both iTunes and Spotify have perfect gapless playback for me - I wouldn't use them if not, as I listen to quite a lot of electronic mix CDs and any gap ruins the flow.
On iTunes it does depend if the source was ripped properly (e.g. with iTunes itself), some older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data for proper gapless (I believe it is due to the overlapping nature of FFT windows - each frame in the mp3 depends on the previous/next frame to fully reconstruct the audio, so the encoder has to store "extra" frames at the start and end) so these will have little glitches.
On Spotify I guess individual sources may have issues (just like a few are obviously ripped from CDs which skip!) but the Chemical Brothers transition you mentioned plays perfectly for me. Maybe check you have "crossfade tracks" disabled in Spotify's advanced settings.
This reads like a spec for a startup opportunity. It's so clear to any one of us what the data model needs to look like and how to make search work. The only real issue is the human labor needed to do the data entry, and the licensing.
The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
You'd be targeting a niche market, not only because of the 3% market mentioned in the article, but because I imagine that all "serious" classical fans (i.e. serious enough to switch to consider using a dedicated streaming service) is also likely to have a big album collection. In other words, you'd likely be targeting a very fast-saturated market.
And that's besides the legal/licensing horrors.
That being said, I think there might be some promise in an add-on for spotify (web-api / browser extension) or iTunes. Just extend the interface with some more metadata. Surely there are some good databases that can be relied on.
I have been telling people this for years, including people already running music businesses but they havent listened. Its a good market as people will pay more, even though the total market size is smaller.
Should I search for 椎名林檎, the Japanese spelling, Shiina Ringo, the transliteration following standard transliteration rules, or Sheena Ringo, the transliteration that the artist has chosen herself? (It's the latter, which was unknown to me)
Moreover, you might be searching for the phonetic spelling using Japanese kana, しいなりんご. That's a lot for a system to handle. Maybe Chinese people will search for her using simplified characters (not for this one in particular, but definitely others)
Even native music players don't get classical right. It's virtually impossible to shuffle through a classical music library because you always get plopped in some movement in the middle of a piece. I've always wished that there were a way to group certain pieces together so that all the movements are treated as one piece for the purposes of shuffle. I remember someone else making this complaint about three years ago and, to my knowledge, nothing has happened since:
The closest you could probably get right now is editing cue files. Years ago, I would group together certain series of Pink Floyd songs when I converted to mp3.
I've been frustrated about this for quite a while. About a year ago, I decided that I should just try to roll my own (just for me, using my music collection).
- prefix grouping (so that Symphonies/Concertos etc are automatically grouped together, and the groupings transfer into playlists etc - so you can queue a whole symphony at once).
- enumeration detection.
- splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist).
- reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!).
- store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store.
- web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio.
Amongst the things that are still in the "plan":
- gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy).
- Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices).
- many more things!
I did the same thing. I solved gapless playback by generating XSPF files and letting a local media player do all the legwork; getting HTML5 to do it seems a little way off.
"The other huge issue, in terms of classical streaming, is sound quality. It stands to reason that picky, "elitist" classical music fans would also be picky about audio standards as well. And while it's entirely true that bit rates don't matter one whit when you're listening through standard-issue earbuds, most of the best-established current services don't emphasize great audio quality. Mahler's epic, sweeping Fifth Symphony, for example, is a watery shadow of itself when I hear it (listening on very good headphones) at 160 kpbs on Spotify's free service. Lossless sound is one of the biggest points of differentiation that Tidal is trying to make for itself, but so far the scope of their classical offerings and the quality of their metadata have been a disappointment."
This person has never ABX tested 160kbps lossy versus lossless. This bogus and unfounded claim calls the rest of his expert assertions into question.
Even on ideal headphones/amp, I know no one who can consistently identify 160kbps from original PCM in an ABX test.
Consistently, maybe not. But I have a few songs in my library that, despite 256kbps bitrate, have half-second encoding artefacts (i.e., maybe six seconds in some 80+ hours collection) that always made me go "whoa, why does my speaker sound funny? …oh, it's that song again" until I canned them – I had them both as MP3 and FLAC in my library due to just importing everything on my HDD. After I wasted time checking speaker cables for the fifth time, I just deleted the MP3 versions.
With FLAC/PCM you simply don't have any "is the bitrate sufficient? Is there no encoder nor decoder bug that introduces artefacts despite sufficient bitrate?" questions, which for me is worth the increased storage requirements.
This bogus and unfounded claim calls the rest of his expert assertions into question.
Let's not overgeneralize. One bogus claim (about sound quality) does not render the rest of the assertions (mainly about metadata and how accurate information is missing on streaming services) faulty.
On topic: as others mentioned, don't you think some types of music lends itself better to being recognized as 160kbps vs lossless than other, and classical with it's typical larger dynamic range than a standard pop song would be one of those types? I'm not saying the author's claim is valid, nor invalid, just that it's not completely impossible he was hearing it was not lossless. Though I doubt it.
BBC Radio 3 in the UK streams classical music at 320kbs over the internet. (I'm not sure if international users get this high bitrate stream or a lower bitrate though.)
She has a point, but overall I'm reminded of Louis C.K.'s "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" schtick. I've gotten pretty deep into classical music - consuming a dozen or so books on the subject and listening to nearly all of the referenced works - essentially because of streaming services. I would have had to spend thousands of dollars to be able to listen to all the classical music I've listened to in the last 2 - 3 years.
Yes, finding a specific recording is sometimes hit-or-miss, but I've found world class recordings of just about everything I've looked up, and it's almost always easy. It's pretty easy to spot a Deutsche Grammaphone or Naxos recording, and I find that the services are getting better and better at surfacing high quality recordings when you search for a given work.
It's odd that she doesn't mention Apple Music since it has been in the news - I find their metadata and presentation of that metadata to be worlds better than Spotify or Rdio.
I found the resources at CHARM fascinating as I have an interest in the evolution of recorded sound and how that has worked to change performing styles.
The ISGM provides competently recorded professional performances of chamber repertoire (mostly classical/romantic eras) for download and in their biweekly podcast. Some well-known performers.
Remember that a professional musician at the start of a career now has to compete with 100 years of recorded material, all potentially simultaneously available!
It's quite ranty, seems the author didn't really do much research - in this thread there are several promising classical only streaming services mentioned -
The recommendation engines on Spotify, Tidal etc are usually rubbish for anything, so I'm not surprised it's the same for classical.
I've found Youtube to be the best place for more niche music, and their recommendation engine is pretty good. Sure it's not super high bitrate but does the job for me. Ads are the only annoyance.
The metadata is provided by the labels. For their top-selling popular music that they earn songwriting and performance royalties on, the metadata is typically very thoroughly checked and accurate (although there are still mistakes). For classical music that is long out of copyright for the music, they care a lot less and the metadata is filled with mistakes. Most streaming services make a decent effort to try to clean up the metadata, but to a large extent, it's just a case of garbage in, garbage out.
I had exactly this prblem when I signed up to Qobuz yesterday. Just as the author did, I typed in 'Mozart magic Flute' and got all kind of crap back in no specific order. They did however allow me to select a specific CD and sort of 'save' that.
'Brahms Clarinet' didnt do well at all.
Metatdata designed for pop / rock doesn't work for classical.
I cancelled my Qobuz sub after a few hours on the basis that they didn't even TRY to solve this problem.
The "Album-Song" organisational metaphor just doesn't work for classical music. However they could do quite a lot with the current metadata: grouping tracks using prefixes etc.
One of my biggest gripes is that searches often return individual "songs", whereas for classical music you're generally looking for something that spans multiple tracks (and so what to see more context in the search output).
As classical fans themselves, they pay more attention to artists, composers, and performances. But there's still a limited amount of info they can announce.
Hit the Ogg stream and it loaded in VLC (Devuan linux, basically Debian 8, on my old Thinkpad). Oddly enough, given the OA, I can't find any information within VLC about what I'm listening to. The announcer has just explained that it was a Brendel recording of a Mozart sonata.
Nice station.
Edit: the what's playing page has a full time plan of the 'broadcast' with links to purchasing the particular recording being played. Those links contain the full performer/artist information.
The author goes on a lot about metadata and bad search interfaces for it. Yes, classical music metadata doesn't fit with the "simple" pop music artist/album/song format. (Though the "featuring" and remixes in pop music also mess that up.)
Often people try too hard to fit data into a fixed schema or ontology. It made sense when data storage and retrieval was based around tabular and relational data, but in these days of search engines and document databases and JSON, it's just unnecessary. Instead of pre-determining the fields you search on, you should search with free text, then refine with whatever metadata happens to be available.
So instead of messing with Spotify's "artist" search, you could just go to Amazon (or Google) and type in "Beethoven's Ninth Bernstein New York Philharmonic" and you'll almost certainly get back the items you want near the top of the list.
i think alot of the suggesting issues is with the collaborative filtering model often used in suggesting songs in a streaming music service.
The collaborative filtering model is not well suited for communities with extremely high variance within a specific genre. In other words, in the context of the model, classical, and classical sub genres are not differentiated enough, in terms of individual interest, to form a new independent cluster. The example being, I like romantic era classical, but i don't thumbs down at the first note of a classical/period classical piece. It's that openness that retrospectively is killing the model.
A human curated classical playlists like on 8track, I suspect produces a better experience (of course depending on who put the list together). Crowd sourcing beats collaborative filtering here it seems.
Your 100% correct saying centuries of music all labeled as classical is the first problem, BUT I would say the sub-genres are fairly strong. Your example for Romantic period is almost 100 years of music from 1820 to World War I.
Jazz streaming is much better but that has a very much shorter music period and clearer sub-genres.
THE PROBLEM: Live Classical is amazing and recorded Classical is meh. Same thing with Gospel music, most Jazz and Opera. If you have never heard a 75+ Gospel Choir live you really are missing an awesome experience and same can be said of Blues.
Most modern music sounds the same or MUCH BETTER recorded. Think EDM, pop music (That is the reason why most performances are more karaoke ie No back up band or even better no band and lip syncing).
The very same issues plague modern music too. I listen to a lot of electronic music, which comes with a lot of people making remixes and such. Those are already a massive pain.
Then i also listen to vocaloid music, where the complexity gets downright insane. Vocaloid music is music where the "performer" is a software using a prerecorded soundbank to render the vocals into the final piece.
For those you typically have: The song writer, the music writer, the music arranger, the vocals arranger and one to many soundbanks (which may come in variants, with two soundbanks being recorded from the same person, but with different tonal qualities). And to put the cherry on top, most of the people making this music only put them on youtube or niconico, the japanese youtube.
Getting sound files with any sort of useful metadata for those is almost impossible.
Urgh, I made the mistake of trying out the Classics Online HD.LL mentioned in the article.
I had to make an account before I could actually find out the payment/subscription details, and only after getting that far did I discover that the "web-player" requires a special streaming plugin with no Linux port.
None of this was helped by the website being godawfully slow to do anything, and it popping up a box asking me to install the plugin every 10 seconds when I wasn't even trying to play music.
Finally I get sick of all of this and try to delete my account, which is, as far as I can tell, impossible.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|10 years ago|reply
Most people listen to classical way too quietly. Most classical music has a very wide dynamic range. Your volume should be adjusted so that the very quietest parts are loud enough to hear every subtlety and so that the loudest parts shake your bones.
A single trumpet playing at full volume is loud enough to cause hearing damage. An orchestra has several of them, along with 50+ other instruments.
Loud orchestras are loud enough that freaking cannons do not necessarily overpower them.
So next time you're listening to classical music (or jazz), crank it up, and discover how much more you enjoy it.
Unfortunately, you'll ruin streaming and radio, though. They're often compressed, ruining that huge dynamic range. Each piece will have a different level, so you'll constantly be playing with your volume knob to get it set correctly. Which is really hard if you've never heard the piece before -- is it supposed to be loud or quiet?
And if you're listening to the radio with the volume set correctly, the announcer will start screaming at you. I love the CBC's Julie Nesrallah's voice, but I can't listen to her program because they have her voice turned up way too loud. If they turned it down the program would be much more enjoyable, and people would enjoy the music more because they'd turn their radio up to hear her properly.
[+] [-] nothrabannosir|10 years ago|reply
A pet-peeve; this is meaningless without a distance. I'd rather attend an orchestra performance from the balcony than put a trumpet to my ear.
"x is louder than a jet engine!" from the pilot's seat or standing on the wings? "louder than a crying baby," in the bedroom or in my arms?
Sorry for hijacking your insightful comment, +1.
[+] [-] _mulder_|10 years ago|reply
And if you're listening in a car, then digital compression is the least of your audio problems.
[+] [-] DenisM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planckscnst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|10 years ago|reply
But a bespoke solution for streaming classical music should ideally have metadata fields for all those things: conductor, soloists, orchestra, recording venue, date, etc. etc.
I'd be willing to bet that internally most of those services are using nothing more sophisticated than the id3 tags I remember mucking with in winamp back when Napster was still a thing.
[+] [-] dogma1138|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Expez|10 years ago|reply
This means that for many it's still more profitable to sell a small amount of CDs than to be on spotify.
I suspect this will change over the years because there's now a very large overlap between those that still listen to CDs, don't use spotify, and listen to classical music.
[+] [-] pionar|10 years ago|reply
The pieces on streaming services (just like CDs) are not 45 minutes long, though. They're separated into movements that are typically between 4 and 10 minutes long. So, while you could listen to all of the Rite of Spring if you want for its entire 40 minute runtime (and I do a lot, as it's my favorite orchestral work), you usually don't. You might listen to only the Introduction to The Sacrifice, which is only about 4-5 minutes.
[+] [-] skywhopper|10 years ago|reply
The fact is that good metadata requires human verification and editing, and editors are the last thing any Internet company wants to spend money on.
[+] [-] Intermernet|10 years ago|reply
Try listening to Abbey Road, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or any other album that relies on zero second time gaps between tracks with a constant beat (The most recent example I can remember would be Chemical Brothers, "Further", between track 1 and 2). That is annoying, and has been throughout the history of stream-able audio.
Why can't we get canonical track timing for albums (down to the sample) and base the playlists accurately off them?
Does anyone else have this problem, or am I doing something terribly wrong? I've come across this problem on iTunes, WMP, Spotify, VLC, Google Music, Soundcloud and pretty much any other digital audio player out there that isn't designed for production (Traktor, Serato, DAWs). The fact that Traktor and Serato get this perfectly right hints that the "consumer" products just don't really care about this problem.
[+] [-] tommyd|10 years ago|reply
On iTunes it does depend if the source was ripped properly (e.g. with iTunes itself), some older mp3s do not have the necessary additional data for proper gapless (I believe it is due to the overlapping nature of FFT windows - each frame in the mp3 depends on the previous/next frame to fully reconstruct the audio, so the encoder has to store "extra" frames at the start and end) so these will have little glitches.
On Spotify I guess individual sources may have issues (just like a few are obviously ripped from CDs which skip!) but the Chemical Brothers transition you mentioned plays perfectly for me. Maybe check you have "crossfade tracks" disabled in Spotify's advanced settings.
[+] [-] rectang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|10 years ago|reply
The market is huge though. Whoever steps up and attacks this with VC will do quite nicely.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup launched from this article in the next YC round.
[+] [-] sisl|10 years ago|reply
And that's besides the legal/licensing horrors.
That being said, I think there might be some promise in an add-on for spotify (web-api / browser extension) or iTunes. Just extend the interface with some more metadata. Surely there are some good databases that can be relied on.
[+] [-] birdsbolt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincormack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply
Should I search for 椎名林檎, the Japanese spelling, Shiina Ringo, the transliteration following standard transliteration rules, or Sheena Ringo, the transliteration that the artist has chosen herself? (It's the latter, which was unknown to me)
Moreover, you might be searching for the phonetic spelling using Japanese kana, しいなりんご. That's a lot for a system to handle. Maybe Chinese people will search for her using simplified characters (not for this one in particular, but definitely others)
[+] [-] splat|10 years ago|reply
http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-musi...
[+] [-] ashmud|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhowden|10 years ago|reply
I've since open sourced my effort here:
https://github.com/tchaik/tchaik
What it does (so far):
- prefix grouping (so that Symphonies/Concertos etc are automatically grouped together, and the groupings transfer into playlists etc - so you can queue a whole symphony at once). - enumeration detection. - splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist). - reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!). - store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store. - web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio.
Amongst the things that are still in the "plan": - gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy). - Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices). - many more things!
[+] [-] lamby|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|10 years ago|reply
This person has never ABX tested 160kbps lossy versus lossless. This bogus and unfounded claim calls the rest of his expert assertions into question.
Even on ideal headphones/amp, I know no one who can consistently identify 160kbps from original PCM in an ABX test.
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
With FLAC/PCM you simply don't have any "is the bitrate sufficient? Is there no encoder nor decoder bug that introduces artefacts despite sufficient bitrate?" questions, which for me is worth the increased storage requirements.
[+] [-] stinos|10 years ago|reply
Let's not overgeneralize. One bogus claim (about sound quality) does not render the rest of the assertions (mainly about metadata and how accurate information is missing on streaming services) faulty.
On topic: as others mentioned, don't you think some types of music lends itself better to being recognized as 160kbps vs lossless than other, and classical with it's typical larger dynamic range than a standard pop song would be one of those types? I'm not saying the author's claim is valid, nor invalid, just that it's not completely impossible he was hearing it was not lossless. Though I doubt it.
[+] [-] chestnut-tree|10 years ago|reply
BBC Radio 3 in the UK streams classical music at 320kbs over the internet. (I'm not sure if international users get this high bitrate stream or a lower bitrate though.)
[+] [-] fleshgolem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|10 years ago|reply
Yes, finding a specific recording is sometimes hit-or-miss, but I've found world class recordings of just about everything I've looked up, and it's almost always easy. It's pretty easy to spot a Deutsche Grammaphone or Naxos recording, and I find that the services are getting better and better at surfacing high quality recordings when you search for a given work.
It's odd that she doesn't mention Apple Music since it has been in the news - I find their metadata and presentation of that metadata to be worlds better than Spotify or Rdio.
[+] [-] keithpeter|10 years ago|reply
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html
The ISGM provides competently recorded professional performances of chamber repertoire (mostly classical/romantic eras) for download and in their biweekly podcast. Some well-known performers.
Remember that a professional musician at the start of a career now has to compete with 100 years of recorded material, all potentially simultaneously available!
[+] [-] dharma1|10 years ago|reply
http://www.contraclassics.com http://www.idagio.com http://composed.com
Composed look like they will be doing a good job - https://composed.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0hpm5/
The recommendation engines on Spotify, Tidal etc are usually rubbish for anything, so I'm not surprised it's the same for classical.
I've found Youtube to be the best place for more niche music, and their recommendation engine is pretty good. Sure it's not super high bitrate but does the job for me. Ads are the only annoyance.
[+] [-] alwaysdoit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vermooten|10 years ago|reply
'Brahms Clarinet' didnt do well at all.
Metatdata designed for pop / rock doesn't work for classical.
I cancelled my Qobuz sub after a few hours on the basis that they didn't even TRY to solve this problem.
[+] [-] dhowden|10 years ago|reply
One of my biggest gripes is that searches often return individual "songs", whereas for classical music you're generally looking for something that spans multiple tracks (and so what to see more context in the search output).
[+] [-] chiph|10 years ago|reply
http://theclassicalstation.org/listen.shtml
As classical fans themselves, they pay more attention to artists, composers, and performances. But there's still a limited amount of info they can announce.
[+] [-] keithpeter|10 years ago|reply
Nice station.
Edit: the what's playing page has a full time plan of the 'broadcast' with links to purchasing the particular recording being played. Those links contain the full performer/artist information.
[+] [-] gkanapathy|10 years ago|reply
Often people try too hard to fit data into a fixed schema or ontology. It made sense when data storage and retrieval was based around tabular and relational data, but in these days of search engines and document databases and JSON, it's just unnecessary. Instead of pre-determining the fields you search on, you should search with free text, then refine with whatever metadata happens to be available.
So instead of messing with Spotify's "artist" search, you could just go to Amazon (or Google) and type in "Beethoven's Ninth Bernstein New York Philharmonic" and you'll almost certainly get back the items you want near the top of the list.
[+] [-] leecarraher|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
Jazz streaming is much better but that has a very much shorter music period and clearer sub-genres.
THE PROBLEM: Live Classical is amazing and recorded Classical is meh. Same thing with Gospel music, most Jazz and Opera. If you have never heard a 75+ Gospel Choir live you really are missing an awesome experience and same can be said of Blues.
Most modern music sounds the same or MUCH BETTER recorded. Think EDM, pop music (That is the reason why most performances are more karaoke ie No back up band or even better no band and lip syncing).
[+] [-] Mithaldu|10 years ago|reply
Then i also listen to vocaloid music, where the complexity gets downright insane. Vocaloid music is music where the "performer" is a software using a prerecorded soundbank to render the vocals into the final piece.
For those you typically have: The song writer, the music writer, the music arranger, the vocals arranger and one to many soundbanks (which may come in variants, with two soundbanks being recorded from the same person, but with different tonal qualities). And to put the cherry on top, most of the people making this music only put them on youtube or niconico, the japanese youtube.
Getting sound files with any sort of useful metadata for those is almost impossible.
[+] [-] justincormack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepyhead|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cillian64|10 years ago|reply
I had to make an account before I could actually find out the payment/subscription details, and only after getting that far did I discover that the "web-player" requires a special streaming plugin with no Linux port.
None of this was helped by the website being godawfully slow to do anything, and it popping up a box asking me to install the plugin every 10 seconds when I wasn't even trying to play music.
Finally I get sick of all of this and try to delete my account, which is, as far as I can tell, impossible.