All About Streaming Music Services

[Mandryka]

People who like applemusic, I can see theee advantages over spotify reading this thread.

1.sound quality
2 access to own music.
3. Interesting suggestions

Is that right, or have I missed something. How is their catalogue? Someone who has it, how many tracks come up for Grigny (spotify here has 629) and for Ferneyhough (213 on spotify) and for Mozart (186995)?

[Holden]

People who like applemusic, I can see theee advantages over spotify reading this thread.

1.sound quality
2 access to own music.
3. Interesting suggestions

Is that right, or have I missed something. How is their catalogue? Someone who has it, how many tracks come up for Grigny (spotify here has 629) and for Ferneyhough (213 on spotify) and for Mozart (186995)?

You can access your own music with Spotify as it has a local library connection. However, I can just as easily do that with JRiver.

[Mandryka]

You can access your own music with Spotify as it has a local library connection. However, I can just as easily do that with JRiver.

Spotify will only let me access mp3, not lossless formats. It's potentially an issue because someday I'd like to access my own music, which is mostly flac, via the internet. I've tried several proposed ways but none was satisfactory.

[Gurn Blanston]

I'm not especially knowledgeable about streaming music, but knowing how some of you guys are set up, and also how I am set up, why can't I have my own web page (just like the one I have now from Go-Daddy for $1.50 / month) and store my terabyte of flacs there, and then play them back with some sort of streaming player, of which I can imagine there are many. Why use a service when I/you have 5000+ cd's worth of flacs? Is that totally inane? 

[Mandryka]

I'm not especially knowledgeable about streaming music, but knowing how some of you guys are set up, and also how I am set up, why can't I have my own web page (just like the one I have now from Go-Daddy for $1.50 / month) and store my terabyte of flacs there, and then play them back with some sort of streaming player, of which I can imagine there are many. Why use a service when I/you have 5000+ cd's worth of flacs? Is that totally inane? 

I think streaming services are really for people who want to discover lots of new stuff. Look, someone just told me that Alan Curtis has died, I know nothing about him, and bingo, at the touch of an ipad I'm listening to him playing Louis Couperin. Through my hifi. Earlier this week I found a tremedous new recording of Fiori Muscale and last week I could easily hear a trio by Michael Finnissy when someone said it was interesting.  I value that sort of thing enough to pay spotify for the pleasure.

Can you really store ITB in a cloud for $1.50 pm? How will you upload it? Will it download fast enough with 4G to play as a stream without jumps for buffering?

[Gurn Blanston]

I think streaming services are really for people who want to discover lots of new stuff. Look, someone just told me that Alan Curtis has died, I know nothing about him, and bingo, at the touch of an ipad I'm listening to him playing Louis Couperin. Through my hifi. Earlier this week I found a tremedous new recording of Fiori Muscale and last week I could easily hear a trio by Michael Finnissy when someone said it was interesting.  I value that sort of thing enough to pay spotify for the pleasure.

Can you really store ITB in a cloud for $1.50 pm? How will you upload it? Will it download fast enough with 4G to play as a stream without jumps for buffering?

I don't know, I've not looked into it yet. My storage for my own web site is something like 20 gigs, IIRC. It has plenty enough bandwidth for just 1 user to stream all day long. If I had some obscure name for it, no one would be likely to just stumble upon it and hook up.  I wouldn't be able to upload on my satellite, but I know people with fiber optic with unlimited upload/download who would do it for me.

Sorry to hear about Alan Curtis, I have a couple of disks of him on keyboard, and another or two of him as a conductor. I enjoy them...

Anyway, I see your point, although hell, I have a ton of music I've not anywhere near worn out yet, a lot of it has been one listen each, and never time to go back for more. I guess it will all depend on your own personal needs.

[Wakefield]

I think streaming services are really for people who want to discover lots of new stuff. Look, someone just told me that Alan Curtis has died, I know nothing about him, and bingo, at the touch of an ipad I'm listening to him playing Louis Couperin. Through my hifi. Earlier this week I found a tremedous new recording of Fiori Muscale and last week I could easily hear a trio by Michael Finnissy when someone said it was interesting.  I value that sort of thing enough to pay spotify for the pleasure.

Bad news. I hadn't read anything about his death. 

His recording of both the English and French Suites on Teldec has been highly praised here a number of times, when the issue has been discussed.

[Madiel]

I think streaming services are really for people who want to discover lots of new stuff.

Which is exactly what I use them for, for free.

[Wakefield]

People who like applemusic, I can see theee advantages over spotify reading this thread.

1.sound quality
2 access to own music.
3. Interesting suggestions

Is that right, or have I missed something. How is their catalogue? Someone who has it, how many tracks come up for Grigny (spotify here has 629) and for Ferneyhough (213 on spotify) and for Mozart (186995)?

I don't know if this adds something to you, but there are also available a fair amount of video clips, both classical and popular. For instance, yesterday I watched a video of Argerich and Barenboim playing Schumann's "Andante and Variations for Two Pianos" Op. 42.

BTW, few days ago I posted a link related to a court decision (on copyright matters) involving the song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke. After that, I searched for it on Apple Music and I was surprised because a video including nudity scenes (with some graceful girls dancing in topless) was available, without any kind of "parental advisory" or something like that.     

[stingo]

I just stumbled upon SiriusXM's Roku channel. (Looked for it for a while, but then forgot about it.) Listening to Prokofiev's Symphony No. 6/Gergiev.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Maybe I've missed it in this thread (or other theads), but I wonder which streaming service has the best selection of different performances. Is it possible to find obscurities and/or historic recordings, or is it all a huge mass of Itzahk Perlman, Lang Lang, and Dude-uh-mel? I don't think I would ever sign up for a paid service, but I am tempted to try something free, mainly to find new music and new performances, which I would eventually buy on CD (or download). 

[Bogey]

Maybe I've missed it in this thread (or other theads), but I wonder which streaming service has the best selection of different performances. Is it possible to find obscurities and/or historic recordings, or is it all a huge mass of Itzahk Perlman, Lang Lang, and Dude-uh-mel? I don't think I would ever sign up for a paid service, but I am tempted to try something free, mainly to find new music and new performances, which I would eventually buy on CD (or download).

We just did Pandora 1 for a few bones a month.  Great for background music while doing other things, but for serious listening it is a bit wanting.  Plus you have to work that thumbs up and down for a week or so to start getting what you really want.  I have decent surf music and exotica channels now, but it took time.

[Holden]

Maybe I've missed it in this thread (or other theads), but I wonder which streaming service has the best selection of different performances. Is it possible to find obscurities and/or historic recordings, or is it all a huge mass of Itzahk Perlman, Lang Lang, and Dude-uh-mel? I don't think I would ever sign up for a paid service, but I am tempted to try something free, mainly to find new music and new performances, which I would eventually buy on CD (or download).

I've been using Spotify for a while now and been quite impressed with the range of historical recordings available. I decided to check out Erich Kleiber and found a wide range of his recordings and that's only one example. I've also found that the new Apple service has stuff that Spotify doesn't and vice versa. The downside for both services is that there is a lot of stuff that you think they would have and don't. This includes your Lang Langs.

So having checked out many of the services including Deezer, Pandora, Rdio, etc I am happy with Spotify and also think that many would find Apple an excellent alternative.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

Thanks. Will check out Spotify for starters.

[Mandryka]

Qobuz have a cheap classical only streaming service, 15€ per month, which I've started to explore.

Sound quality is better than spotify. In the case of Egarr's Purcell suites and Louis Couperin, the difference is astonishing.

Search via the squeezebox app is much more difficult than with spotify. Though I can sense that in time I'll learn how to drive it better.

Some things on qobuz which are not on spotify, and it looks like some important artists (Jane Chapman is an example, or Purcell from Phantasm) are missing from qobuz.

[amw]

Thanks, all.

I know Qobuz subscriptions are available in the UK - I just wondered whether anyone had found a way to access the 15-day free trial, since the link doesn't actually link to anything.  Perhaps you get it automatically when you sign up, which I'm going to do when I get back from holiday in a couple of weeks.

I think you do get the free trial automatically when you sign up but it's been a while.

Qobuz is good but it's clear that we're hitting it towards the end of its lifespan. A lot of label catalogues have been 'purged'—e.g. the other day I wanted to look through the catalogue of Norwegian specialist label Simax Classics, which their search algorithm still records as having 100+ results, but which in reality is down to a handful of recent releases. (Fortunately they're on Naxos... I think.) New World Records had something like 500 recordings up which I'd listen to at semi-random in search of some good new music, until suddenly they were just completely gone; same with Kairos. Oehms and Hyperion used to be streamable, but Oehms decided to go download-only and Hyperion got removed from the service altogether. Labels are pulling out; clearly they weren't making enough money off of it and are hoping to get back to the buy-a-CD model. Streaming does, however, create an entirely different kind of listening environment that can't be replicated by buying a lot of CDs, which I guess they don't realise.

Main advantages of Qobuz are the quality (lossless streaming) and some of the labels (e.g. Universal, Outhere, Supraphon, every French label you can think of and most of the Italians). And it's not too expensive. Search is bad, but that's partly because of tagging issues which are the same everywhere.

[Madiel]

Atlantic article about Apple Music and iTunes but generally about how lousy digital files and streaming services are with classical music metadata.

To be fair, I don't think it is as hard as described in the article to find specific classical recordings in iTunes, but I understand the complaints.

I read the same article today. Some of the complaints are specifically about the newest version of iTunes/the Apple Music service causing problems that didn't previously exist.

I've deliberately not updated my copy of iTunes precisely because I don't want to get caught up in the bugs that are clearly present as they try to introduce a fairly fundamental change in the functionality of the program. Even without having upgraded, I'm highly suspicious that some of what they've done in the background is filtering through to me: I've twice had a problem with my iPhone when making changes to the music collection on it via my computer, with albums having duplicate records of themselves and thereby wanting to play every track twice, and this is a problem that I can't recall ever having before in over 4 years of use. It could be coincidence, or it could be result of the shenanigans involved in having an Apple Music library in parallel to a user's own library of recordings.

Up until now I would have said that iTunes' metadata for classical music was a lot more consistent than some rivals such as Spotify. However, there are clearly severe problems at the moment. There are ample reports of stupid behaviour with non-classical music such as replacing live versions of songs with studio versions because they have the same title and artist, or not accepting that you might have two copies of a song because one belongs on the original album and the other belongs on a greatest hits album.

[DaveF]

I think you do get the free trial automatically when you sign up but it's been a while.

Yes, you do, thanks, and I did - and then cancelled because I realised I would just spend too much time listening, to the exclusion of everything else.

[Wakefield]

These last days, I have  been recurrently experiencing this problem on Apple Music: some tracks aren't fully played before skipping towards the next track. I guess I don't need to say how infuriating this results. It happened, for instance, some minutes ago, while I listened to Peter Frankl playing Schumann's Symphonic Etudes Op. 13.

Anyone else has had some similar problem? 

[mc ukrneal]

These last days, I have  been recurrently experiencing this problem on Apple Music: some tracks aren't fully played before skipping towards the next track. I guess I don't need to say how infuriating this results. It happened, for instance, some minutes ago, while I listened to Peter Frankl playing Schumann's Symphonic Etudes Op. 13.

Anyone else has had some similar problem? 

Looks like the problem is widespread: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/apple-music-what-happened-125794827239.html