All About Streaming Music Services

[NumberSix]

Alongside my 60-day trial of TIDAL, I have also been trying out Idagio for a 2-week run. (I tried it about a year ago and thought I would give it another chance.)

On paper, it has everything a classical fan could ask. Unlike Presto, it has the ability to make playlists and to carve out tracks or works from an album when playing.

In Presto, it's like playing a record: You can start where you want within an album, and you can manually change to another track -- but you can't set it to, for instance, only play the 3rd Symphony from a boxset of all the Bruckners. If you don't stop it, it will keep going.

Idagio lets you have a little more control of what you add to the play queue. But my complaint is the same as it was last time: The software is just ugly and a hassle to navigate. It takes too many clicks to do many things, and the phone or desktop app will be slow sometimes to respond.

Plus, here's something weird: When playing a piece on my iPhone, the app will sometimes choose the composer's picture instead of the album art -- especially when playing from a playlist. Obviously, that's not the end of the world. But it is odd and kind of annoying.

And for all the metadata offered in Presto and Idagio, their search functionality sucks. You can't drill down. In Apple Classical, I can search "Beethoven". It will then let me choose a work. From that work, I will see some recommended and popular recordings. But then I can expand to all the recordings. From that "all" list, I can scroll down, sorting by date or popularity. Or I can further search for something like "Karajan" or "Chicago". [and of course, just like with any music app, I could start with something like "Brahms 4 Solti" and skip all that drill-down]

Plus, Apple Classical just all around looks prettier. I wish it had a MacOS app I could use instead of the main Apple Music app for Classical when at my desk, and I suspect it will eventually. (in the meantime, they could have the option to use the iPad since I have a silicon chip, but they don't so far).

Regardless of that limitation, Apple is still at this point my top software for classical music.

[Madiel]

Hang on, pretty well everything you're saying you can do in Apple but not Idagio, I can do in Idagio.

I know nothing about playlists. But almost all my searching is by work, not by album. And yes, when I do this it uses the picture of the composer. Because I'm not in an album, I'm in a performance of a work.

Idagio simply doesn't treat the album as the primary unit of music, it gives you the choice. You can switch between album mode and work mode fairly easily. But several of your comments read as if you were thinking in album terms and ended up in the work side of things without entirely realising.

I can most certainly look up Beethoven and then get a list of Beethoven works that I can filter. That is EXACTLY how I use Idagio 95% of the time. I only land on album pages very occasionally.

[Madiel]

Idagio Works page. Note also that "albums" and "recordings" are 2 distinct options. "Recordings" will take you to recordings of works, though to be honest I never use this, I'll go to the work first and pick a recording. But "recordings" are what you will find in playlists.

[Madiel]

Here are my recent Idagio searches. You will see it's perfectly possible to search for a composer, which will take you to a page like the one in my previous post. Or for a work. Or for an album.

So the problems you were having honestly mostly sound like you were treating Idagio as if it was album-focused, and not realising you can bypass them entirely. It actually OPENS for me on mobile on the browse page with famous composers at the very top, which is why I found the comments about "on Apple Music I can search for Beethoven" a bit bewildering. On Idagio I don't technically even have to search for Beethoven. I just have to scroll to the right a little past Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart.

[NumberSix]

Idagio Works page. Note also that "albums" and "recordings" are 2 distinct options. "Recordings" will take you to recordings of works, though to be honest I never use this, I'll go to the work first and pick a recording. But "recordings" are what you will find in playlists.

I would say that you're correct about the way I've been thinking of approaching search and organization. It's absolutely been coloring my use of the service.

I appreciate your thoughts and your including some images. I will give the service a little bit more time and see if it works better for me if I try to adjust the way I think about it.

[Madiel]

I would say that you're correct about the way I've been thinking of approaching search and organization. It's absolutely been coloring my use of the service.

I appreciate your thoughts and your including some images. I will give the service a little bit more time and see if it works better for me if I try to adjust the way I think about it.

Happy to help, it's okay if you still don't prefer it but it's worth knowing what's possible. I suspect the key for you would be to try the Browse page, it sounds like you've spent a lot of time on Discover, which is much more about showing latest album releases and curated playlists.

I should probably clarify, on the works page for a composer, the search bar will only search within that composer's list of works. And it filters pretty well for most things, if I know an opus number or similar I'll often just type that in the search bar and immediately get the relevant work.  The "filter" button on that page is to filter the list of works by genre (orchestral, chamber, vocal etc.)