Apple has launched an app dedicated to classical music, Apple Music Classical, which comes as part of an Apple Music subscription.
It looks to be a great way to explore a huge catalogue often not all that well served by the other big names in music streaming.
What is Apple Music Classical?
Apple claims to have the “world’s largest classical music catalog”, a claim also made by a company Apple acquired in 2021, Primephonic.
Primephonic was a classical music-only streaming service and it was taken offline after the acquisition. “We are working on an amazing new classical music experience from Apple,” was the last word from the Primephonic team in August 2021. Two and a half years later, that appears to have become a reality.
Apple said its service offers access to five million tracks, including “thousands of exclusive albums”. When Primephonic shut down, it advertised its library as offering 3.5 million tracks and 230,000 albums.
Apple Music Classical features thematic playlists, guides and biographies of composers. While the standard Apple Music app features similar editorial content, delving back through hundreds of years of music history gives it all a more educational flavour.
Apple Music Classical features
Tracks are available as standard in as high a quality as is available, up to 192kHz 24-bit Hi-Res. This is no surprise, though, given Apple brought lossless audio to Apple Music at no extra cost in 2021.
Certain tracks will also be offered in spatial audio, a processing technique that makes music sound as if it is surrounding you, rather than in stereo. Classical orchestral music is arguably the best candidate for this sort of surround sound magic.
However, Apple Music Classical does not appear to have the highest-quality tracks originally available through Primephonic. It offered very hefty DSD streams, but Apple Music has never supported this standard.
Apple Music Classical is available everywhere the plain old Apple Music subscription is offered, bar Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey. The exceptions are probably down to licensing issues. Primephonic never launched in Japan, for example.
Apple Music Classical is available to download now for iOS devices. It has not been released for Android devices, despite Apple Music being available on the platform.
