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Classical music is one of the hardest genres to surface through existing music apps. Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "compos

by buro9 5y ago

Classical music is one of the hardest genres to surface through existing music apps. Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist". The variations of the data is huge, only last week I had to correct Tchaikovsky in my own data and looking at the variations I see online: P. I. Tchaïkovski Peter Ilyitch Tchaikofsky Peter Tchaikovsky Petr Ilitch Tchaïkovski Piotr Ilic Tchaikovskij Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovski Piotr Tchaikovski Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (this one is arguably most correct) This is something everyone gets wrong, and yet whomever gets it right is going to help make it easier for people to find and celebrate classical music, and to expose more people to classical music. Even if today you know that you love Beethoven's Symphony No 3... finding the best performance and recording is almost impossible, and if you do happen to stumble upon it on a streaming service getting back to it later (if it wasn't the only one in your recents) is difficult. I'm really glad someone is investing in this, and it needs to be a different app / interface to handle this difference in metadata and in weighting of the fields. Capturing the intent of "oh, this person really just wants to search Gould as a principal soloist and weight the search that way" is far easier when you have an app that can provide a classical music perspective and filter over an existing library. PS: Plex does this really badly too... whatever you do, don't let the Plex Music Agents decide the metadata, Verdi disappeared and had the metadata for Veridia which I believe is a rock band.

spoonjim 5y ago
It's even dumber than that. Want to listen to Brandenburg Concerto No. 5? You'll find an album whose track names start with "Johann Sebastian Bach -- Brandenburg Concertos -- BWV No. XXX" and because the strings are cut off by the UI, you can't see which one is which.
cm2187 5y ago
That's why it makes sense to own classical music rather than rely on a streaming service that will change, come and go (like in this case). In my case I listen to a lot of opera, I have one or two reference recordings for each opera, and I exclude the recitative which aren't really music or interesting when you just listen.
- buro9 5y ago
  100% agree. Actually I go further, I think those into art should always express that through ownership. Books go out of print or the translation varies. Films are unavailable if they're not one of the top grossing films, and even if they are then they can be unavailable (i.e. Disney exercising artificial scarcity over historical titles). I own and ripped over 6k CDs into FLAC a long time ago, and still a good number of these are not available on streaming services even though they were major releases in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s. Why? Because the coverage of EPs, Singles, B-sides, and some variations of albums (Japanese imports with extra tracks) isn't represented by Spotify, Google Music, Tidal, Apple, etc. The only way to ensure you can enjoy something in the future is to own it today. For me, music, video and book streaming / digital rental fills a different problem space - discovery before ownership.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    You make a good point. If you come into an appreciation of certain genres of film or music, and the items you want are out of print, your options are to find the content on the secondary market or acquire pirated copies. I am always more than willing to pay for content, but what is one supposed to do when what you want is out of print and there are no viable secondary market options?
    - hluska 5y ago
      I have a really serious problem, but I spent more than a decade trying to find a copy of REM’s (Hib-Tone) Radio Free Europe 45. That quest led me to dig through some of the sketchiest crates on the planet before I finally gave up and ordered a copy on eBay. To this day, it remains one of the possessions I love most. The hunt and all the crates I dug through add a mythology that beats the actual product. The mix is really good and shows Mitch Easter at his absolute best, but the hunt is worth even more than the artistry. That’s all a long way of saying if there aren’t any secondary market options, keep digging. You’ll eventually find it and the story will be worth more than the recording.
      - 5y ago
ProAm 5y ago
Don't worry Siri will handle this all for you now. You just have to say the words.
- munk-a 5y ago
  "Now playing 'A relaxing Chai Tea on the seaside' radio from spotify."
  - yunohn 5y ago
    I can never get Siri to play things on Spotify for me. So without an Apple Music subscription, it always tries to play radios from Tune-In instead. :/
spoonjim 5y ago
Since this thread will attract classical music fans... anyone want to offer what they think are the all-time greatest recordings of particular pieces? I'll start, Murray Perahia does the definitive recording of Moonlight Sonata Mvmt 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352qLWqKN-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352qLWqKN-U
zamalek 5y ago
I've been giving Qobuz a whirl for technical listening, and they have a very intentional approach to classical music. I'm a bit of a newbie, but I did receive the recommendation from other listeners.
kemiller 5y ago
Yes, fixing the metadata problem is so important. I hope it also means a much larger catalog.
porphyra 5y ago
And then trying to play a playlist on "shuffle" will mess up the ordering of the movements of the pieces, and on "auto" it will just keep playing the same 3 most popular pieces but by various principal soloists or something.
hluska 5y ago
This is way off topic (and I apologize) but it’s remarkably hard to learn about classical music. Would you do me a favour? I’m a classical neophyte and struggle with composer/orchestra/conductor fit. Can you recommend any combinations that I need to hear?? Thus far, I think I like baroque and Bach makes me happy. I’m starting to think I love opera but I might just have a thing for Maria Callas. However, I’m open to any and all recommendations and will love the hell out of anyone who recommends anything. I prefer vinyl but I’ll buy an 8 track if it helps. (Whenever I’ve asked HN for help, I’ve ended up with new favourite recordings of all time. Thanks to all the classical music lovers who have really enhanced my life throughout the years.)
- Areading314 5y ago
  You should definitely listen to Bach's mass in B minor and his cantatas if you like vocal work and Bach. Also listen to Mozart's Requiem. Some other good stuff would be all the symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven. Vivaldi's four seasons. Also try Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and Goldberg Variations. For opera listen to some of the overtures and highlights by Wagner (Tannhauser, Tristan & Isolde, Lohengrin).
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    Also check out Glenn Gould for Bach! Concerto #1 in D minor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLi9A0H8H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLi9A0H8H4
- te_chris 5y ago
  BBC Radio 3 has a whole series about this called Building a Library. There’s a UK retailer called Presto that annotate their stock with the different endorsements too - they sell digital files as well, if you’re not in the UK. Then it’s really about learning what you like. Personally, I’d start by period: broadly, Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi etc), Classical (Beethoven, Mozart etc), Romantic (Debussy, Ravel). The periods have identifiable styles and can be a good way to introduce yourself to the nuance of the compositions. Finally, there’s a question of instrumentation: whether you prefer orchestral, vocal, chamber, solo etc. Sounds like a lot of work, but remember it should be fun! It’s new music, a bunch of which you’ve probably never heard before. Have an open mind and dive in! Also, assuming you have access where you live and the means, live music doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Check out the programs at your local concert halls and go down to hear some music.
apaprocki 5y ago
I highly suggest trying out a classical music collection in Roon. It specifically models some of this stuff to give a better experience.
- amgutier 5y ago
  Roon provides the best classical music experience I've seen (better than when I tried primephonic previously) - there are still some papercuts, but generally it handles normalizing classical metadata well
w-m 5y ago
Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album. I've added a Beethoven piano concerto recording from Apple Music to my library, which at some point was suddenly split into two albums: https://i.imgur.com/HF59nNj.png https://i.imgur.com/HF59nNj.png The albums spontaneously splitting is not limited to classical music. It has happened several times that an album I had added to the library got replaced by a dozen best-off albums containing 1-2 songs each. As an Apple Music subscriber, I welcome the acquisition, and hope that problems like these will be reduced, and I can listen to the 4th concerto in one go again.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  As a fellow Apple Music subscriber, I regret to confirm the "Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album" as a common problem across all genres. :) My personal library really isn't very big, but it still shows what I call "metadata drift": you add an album that has 12 tracks, and eventually notice that while your library still contains those 12 songs, somehow there are now only six tracks on that album, with the other six tracks replaced by versions on various compilations (and if the data gods are feeling particularly mischievous, maybe a live version).
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Also got the Album splitting with one Album from Genesis. On top of that, Apple Music deletes tracks from my library, claiming it has no license - but those tracks were ripped from CD, no idea how I could get them back, I do still have the original files on my Mac.
japers 5y ago
We worked with Primephonic on the development of the platform, and this was one of the topics that got a lot of attention. In this talk about the app architecture [1] a former team mate touches upon the datamodel briefly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERPmUsLkwEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERPmUsLkwEE
trevorhinesley 5y ago
That's unfortunate to hear... Accurate metadata matters to both the artist and the consumer, as you experienced yourself. I feel the need to shamelessly chime in with this because of how random this is, seeing our name on Hacker News: I'm one of the founding guitarists of VERIDIA and yes, the music is rock.
wussboy 5y ago
It's such a nuisance in choral music as well. There are about 1 million canticles, by hundreds of composers, to hundreds of settings, sung by hundreds of choirs, scattered across hundreds of albums. Good luck finding anything even slightly off the beaten path.
comprev 5y ago
Working on this problem of spellings (including non-Latin alphabet versions) was super interesting.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Ah. Well, they're all the same person. Or rather... the same persona. So we know they're a unique person... or persona. But what is identity anyway? What do I mean? Richard David James went by several different aliases. They're all the same person. But not the same persona? Maybe. Couldn't Pac-Mac by Power Pill just be considered Aphex Twin's work? I'd argue, sure. But Brad Strider's work, which is really just Richard again, is in my opinion significant enough from the rest of his work, can you group them together? Discogs still does, and that makes sense to me.
forrestthewoods 5y ago
You are so painfully correct. I wish I knew Primephonic existed because I would have subscribed! If Apple does this well it could be enough to get me to switch from Spotify to Apple Music. I am not optimistic though.
nxpnsv 5y ago
Ha, I’d write ‘Tjajkovskij’ in Swedish and ‘Tschaikowski’ in German, so i guess there are even more variations…
snthd 5y ago
It's a metadata/economics problem. One solution is to use musicbrainz, and contribute as you go. https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc6bc8be9 https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc... https://musicbrainz.org/work/80737426-8ef3-3a9c-a3a6-9507afb93e93 https://musicbrainz.org/work/80737426-8ef3-3a9c-a3a6-9507afb...
- wussboy 5y ago
  Many years ago I was a huge fan of Music Brainz. I found a mis-named album info one time, submitted a request with changes to correct them, was rejected out of hand for an innocuous reason, and never went back. Which is too bad. As an idea and as a model, I love it. But you need the right culture/tool as well.
  - corin_ 5y ago
    I know nothing about Music Brainz, but isn't it inevitable that something with humans involved will sometimes have errors? Is there such a thing as a restaurant that doesn't sometimes get a customer's order wrong, or a team of website moderators (paid or unpaid) who don't occasionally make the wrong judgement call, or a piece of software that occasionally had a bug that wasn't spotted in QA? To go from being a "huge fan" to refusing to use it after a single mistake seems a very extreme reaction, unless that incident caused you to look into it more and discover that they're constantly making similar mistakes. For something like restaurants there's often enough competing options to let a single mistake sour you to a place and choose alternatives in the future, but even then it a restaurant I was a huge fan of messed up a visit of mine I'd most likely give them another chance unless they literally didn't care care that something had gone wrong suggesting it's likely to keep happening. edit: Also curious about what their rejection reason was that led you to describe it as "innocuous", seems an odd adjective to include without context.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  MusicBrainz Picard is the thing that rewrote all of my Russian composers in Cyrillic and after that I was never able to find any of them ever again.
wcerfgba 5y ago
I find jazz has a similar problem: there may be a band leader but usually each instrumentalist is of note, and there is no way I am aware of to track each performer in an ID3 or APE tag. Consider for example the Cannonball Adderley album "Somethin' Else" [1]. The album artist is Cannonball because he led the session, but he is in no way the 'author' of the entire album. The performances of Miles, Hank, Sam and Art on their respective instruments are what make the album what it is. In addition, some of the tunes are 'standards': "Autumn Leaves" is by Kosma and "Love for Sale" is by Porter, although I suppose this info could be stored in the ID3 composer field on each track. I would love a way to track performers across all my jazz albums and be able to see which albums different people performed on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin%27_Else_(Cannonball_Adderley_album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin%27_Else_(Cannonball_A...
- gvurrdon 5y ago
  I very much agree; particularly as I may wish to hear particular bassists and they are usually not listed as the band leader. It would also be useful to able to add multiple tags, both "jazz" and "post bop", for example.
- wcunning 5y ago
  I've found similar problems with a bunch of group names. For instance, I want to listen to more Gerry Mulligan, specifically Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band, which had a Complete Verve recordings album that I got from the jazz collection at my university's music school, but Spotify and Apple do not have. They did several other albums and Mulligan had other groups (trios, quartets, etc) but they're hard to correlate together. Many of the jazz greats were in the boat where they performed on a lot of things that wouldn't list them as primary artists, but that's how you need to find them to find 95% of their work -- especially in instruments like my favorite: trombone. Band leader vs band members doesn't even have an ID3 field to the best of my knowledge without just sticking them all into the artist field. Compound that with the amount of jazz out there in the no-copyright state (because of age or racism or both in the distant past) that only exists in a collector's collection as a 45rpm stamping with low-ish quality and it turns out that there's a lot of missing music from pre-1950 or so.
- 5y ago
crazygringo 5y ago
Yup. What I really want is to be able to browse by composer, then work, and then show me all the performances (regardless of whether a whole album or part of an album), and let be sort/filter by popularity, trending, new, and performer. I'm honestly pretty surprised the metadata problem hasn't been solved by now. Even if the labels are providing it in an inconsistent format, cleaning it all up to 99.9% consistency seems like it could be done fairly efficiently. The universe of the names of classical composers and performers isn't that large.
- isolli 5y ago
  Have you tried Idagio? As a longtime user, I believe it would address your needs rather well. https://www.idagio.com/ https://www.idagio.com/
motoboi 5y ago
All I really wanted was being able to see the full name of the piece when I open an album in Spotify.
true_religion 5y ago
Tragedy of the commons. Since no one owns the tracks anyone can use any valid way of indicating the artists name. No one except the platform actually has the right to merge artist names together when the artist is out of copyright.
mtalantikite 5y ago
Similarly, browsing for Jazz (and some other genres) on streaming services really killed the main way I learned about music growing up. Usually you'd look at an album's liner notes, see who was playing what instrument, and go find more records that that person played on. To give an example, I might have been listening to John Coltrane's Blue Train record, really loved the trumpet player, and have gone and found some Lee Morgan records. I hate to admit it, but Spotify has made me lazy when it comes to music discovery, to the point where the only way I get excited to find new things is by digging for vinyl at a record store. The services feel built for passive entertainment consumption, not discovering and learning about new art.
- asplake 5y ago
  Funny, for me it has been the opposite. Spotify plus Google plus Wikipedia has been awesome.
- crtasm 5y ago
  I wonder if there's anything that ties in data from Discogs to what you're playing on Spotify, think that'd make a difference? I realise it'd be prone to incorrect matches.
montenegrohugo 5y ago
Such an enlightening comment. This is why I come back to HN, I had no idea why it was so hard to discover classical music (and I've experienced that pain point myself)
fishywang 5y ago
I remembered stumped onto an Amsterdam based classical music streaming service a few weeks ago that has a landing page explaining why they do per-second streaming subscription fee share with artists instead of the per-track share, which I think also makes a lot of sense for classical music. Some googling seems to suggest that's Primephonic but I'm not 100% sure about it (since they took down all their pages).
- fishywang 5y ago
  Yes it was Primephonic, found the page on wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042145/https://www.primephonic.com/payout-model https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042145/https://www.prime...
deleted 5y ago
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jeffbee 5y ago
The way voice assistants behave with classical metadata is just terrible, too. Once I naively asked Android Auto to play Act II from Carmen, and it proceeded to recite all of the metadata from the record, which went one for a good solid minute. "OK, playing 'Act 2, Chanson, "Halte-là! Qui va là?", by Georges Bizet, José Carreras & Claudine Coster & Isabelle Karajan & Alain Hitier & Maria Laborit & Berliner Philharmoniker & Herbert von Karajan & Georges Bizet ..." It was just endless!
rodgerd 5y ago
> Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist". Yeah, this is maddening. Although in many ways it's not isolated to classical - the whole standards for tagging and the presentation thereof are woefully inadequate for any case where you want to be able to have a soloist or multiple composers but be able to find the same composer/songwriter regardless of who they've worked with, or featured artists in hiphop, or... I can understand that back in the MP3 days of the late 90s/early years of the century it was "a good start" but the lack of any meaningful improvements is woeful.
koyote 5y ago
Back in the good old days of mp3s I decided I wanted my library to be as 'accurate' as possible with its metadata. I spent a lot of time manually editing metadata. Tchaikovsky was stored as 'Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский'. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad idea on many levels: * No searching * Always ends up on the top/bottom of alphabetically sorted lists * Took much longer to work out which artist it was because I'm not fluent in Cyrillic * The Microsoft Zune's fonts did not support most non-ASCII characters (this was a big one!) That being said, I was young and it looked cool, so I kept it :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kalleboo 5y ago
  I did the same thing back in the day in iTunes with Japanese artists etc. But iTunes had comment and "Sort Artist" and "Sort Title" fields that solved your first 2 problems and the iPod supports the same set of unicode as the Mac, so it worked out pretty well. It also helped teach me Japanese! People complained about the bloat in iTunes, but at times all those features did come in handy! I'll miss the depth of features once Apple finally ends up replacing the Mac music app with a port of the dumbed-down streaming service they have on iOS.
  - needle0 5y ago
    The iTunes service/app in Japan also has a bad habit of automatically converting western artist names into their Japanese transliterated equivalents (eg. Billy Joel → ビリー・ジョエル) despite me not asking for it. Some tracks in your library would get the metadata converted while some other tracks (probably ones ripped from CDs not found in iTunes Match's database) stay as-is, hence both notations end up in the database, making a mess. Really wish it wouldn't do that.
    - tasogare 5y ago
      I hate when automatic translation is creeping into software or websites without a way to stop it. In particular since a few month youtube decided it was ok to list video on its home page with translated titles. As I browse videos in 3/4 languages, it became hard to know what language a video will be it. I did some change on language preferences in my account but it didn't really solve the problem.
lmm 5y ago
Correctly naming performers in different writing systems is just as difficult for non-Classical genres. E.g. this week I listened to a track whose title was given (on Amazon) as "Set The Fire To The Third Bar [feat. マーザ・ウィンライト]".
isolli 5y ago
> I'm really glad someone is investing in this A lot of companies have been investing in this for a while now. Primephonic (which Apple just bought) is only one example. I use Idagio, and I'm very impressed with the quality of the metadata and the search function.

by buro9 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago

It's even dumber than that. Want to listen to Brandenburg Concerto No. 5? You'll find an album whose track names start with "Johann Sebastian Bach -- Brandenburg Concertos -- BWV No. XXX" and because the strings are cut off by the UI, you can't see which one is which.

cm2187 5y ago

That's why it makes sense to own classical music rather than rely on a streaming service that will change, come and go (like in this case). In my case I listen to a lot of opera, I have one or two reference recordings for each opera, and I exclude the recitative which aren't really music or interesting when you just listen.

buro9 5y ago
100% agree. Actually I go further, I think those into art should always express that through ownership. Books go out of print or the translation varies. Films are unavailable if they're not one of the top grossing films, and even if they are then they can be unavailable (i.e. Disney exercising artificial scarcity over historical titles). I own and ripped over 6k CDs into FLAC a long time ago, and still a good number of these are not available on streaming services even though they were major releases in the UK in the 1990s and 2000s. Why? Because the coverage of EPs, Singles, B-sides, and some variations of albums (Japanese imports with extra tracks) isn't represented by Spotify, Google Music, Tidal, Apple, etc. The only way to ensure you can enjoy something in the future is to own it today. For me, music, video and book streaming / digital rental fills a different problem space - discovery before ownership.
- diskzero 5y ago
  You make a good point. If you come into an appreciation of certain genres of film or music, and the items you want are out of print, your options are to find the content on the secondary market or acquire pirated copies. I am always more than willing to pay for content, but what is one supposed to do when what you want is out of print and there are no viable secondary market options?
  - hluska 5y ago
    I have a really serious problem, but I spent more than a decade trying to find a copy of REM’s (Hib-Tone) Radio Free Europe 45. That quest led me to dig through some of the sketchiest crates on the planet before I finally gave up and ordered a copy on eBay. To this day, it remains one of the possessions I love most. The hunt and all the crates I dug through add a mythology that beats the actual product. The mix is really good and shows Mitch Easter at his absolute best, but the hunt is worth even more than the artistry. That’s all a long way of saying if there aren’t any secondary market options, keep digging. You’ll eventually find it and the story will be worth more than the recording.
    - 5y ago

ProAm 5y ago

Don't worry Siri will handle this all for you now. You just have to say the words.

munk-a 5y ago
"Now playing 'A relaxing Chai Tea on the seaside' radio from spotify."
- yunohn 5y ago
  I can never get Siri to play things on Spotify for me. So without an Apple Music subscription, it always tries to play radios from Tune-In instead. :/

spoonjim 5y ago

Since this thread will attract classical music fans... anyone want to offer what they think are the all-time greatest recordings of particular pieces? I'll start, Murray Perahia does the definitive recording of Moonlight Sonata Mvmt 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352qLWqKN-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352qLWqKN-U

zamalek 5y ago

I've been giving Qobuz a whirl for technical listening, and they have a very intentional approach to classical music. I'm a bit of a newbie, but I did receive the recommendation from other listeners.

kemiller 5y ago

Yes, fixing the metadata problem is so important. I hope it also means a much larger catalog.

porphyra 5y ago

And then trying to play a playlist on "shuffle" will mess up the ordering of the movements of the pieces, and on "auto" it will just keep playing the same 3 most popular pieces but by various principal soloists or something.

hluska 5y ago

This is way off topic (and I apologize) but it’s remarkably hard to learn about classical music. Would you do me a favour? I’m a classical neophyte and struggle with composer/orchestra/conductor fit. Can you recommend any combinations that I need to hear?? Thus far, I think I like baroque and Bach makes me happy. I’m starting to think I love opera but I might just have a thing for Maria Callas. However, I’m open to any and all recommendations and will love the hell out of anyone who recommends anything. I prefer vinyl but I’ll buy an 8 track if it helps. (Whenever I’ve asked HN for help, I’ve ended up with new favourite recordings of all time. Thanks to all the classical music lovers who have really enhanced my life throughout the years.)

Areading314 5y ago
You should definitely listen to Bach's mass in B minor and his cantatas if you like vocal work and Bach. Also listen to Mozart's Requiem. Some other good stuff would be all the symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven. Vivaldi's four seasons. Also try Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and Goldberg Variations. For opera listen to some of the overtures and highlights by Wagner (Tannhauser, Tristan & Isolde, Lohengrin).
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Also check out Glenn Gould for Bach! Concerto #1 in D minor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLi9A0H8H4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLi9A0H8H4
te_chris 5y ago
BBC Radio 3 has a whole series about this called Building a Library. There’s a UK retailer called Presto that annotate their stock with the different endorsements too - they sell digital files as well, if you’re not in the UK. Then it’s really about learning what you like. Personally, I’d start by period: broadly, Baroque (Bach, Vivaldi etc), Classical (Beethoven, Mozart etc), Romantic (Debussy, Ravel). The periods have identifiable styles and can be a good way to introduce yourself to the nuance of the compositions. Finally, there’s a question of instrumentation: whether you prefer orchestral, vocal, chamber, solo etc. Sounds like a lot of work, but remember it should be fun! It’s new music, a bunch of which you’ve probably never heard before. Have an open mind and dive in! Also, assuming you have access where you live and the means, live music doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. Check out the programs at your local concert halls and go down to hear some music.

apaprocki 5y ago

I highly suggest trying out a classical music collection in Roon. It specifically models some of this stuff to give a better experience.

amgutier 5y ago
Roon provides the best classical music experience I've seen (better than when I tried primephonic previously) - there are still some papercuts, but generally it handles normalizing classical metadata well

w-m 5y ago

Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album. I've added a Beethoven piano concerto recording from Apple Music to my library, which at some point was suddenly split into two albums: https://i.imgur.com/HF59nNj.png https://i.imgur.com/HF59nNj.png The albums spontaneously splitting is not limited to classical music. It has happened several times that an album I had added to the library got replaced by a dozen best-off albums containing 1-2 songs each. As an Apple Music subscriber, I welcome the acquisition, and hope that problems like these will be reduced, and I can listen to the 4th concerto in one go again.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
As a fellow Apple Music subscriber, I regret to confirm the "Apple Music currently doesn't even get this right within the same album" as a common problem across all genres. :) My personal library really isn't very big, but it still shows what I call "metadata drift": you add an album that has 12 tracks, and eventually notice that while your library still contains those 12 songs, somehow there are now only six tracks on that album, with the other six tracks replaced by versions on various compilations (and if the data gods are feeling particularly mischievous, maybe a live version).
_ph_ 5y ago
Also got the Album splitting with one Album from Genesis. On top of that, Apple Music deletes tracks from my library, claiming it has no license - but those tracks were ripped from CD, no idea how I could get them back, I do still have the original files on my Mac.

japers 5y ago

We worked with Primephonic on the development of the platform, and this was one of the topics that got a lot of attention. In this talk about the app architecture [1] a former team mate touches upon the datamodel briefly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERPmUsLkwEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERPmUsLkwEE

trevorhinesley 5y ago

That's unfortunate to hear... Accurate metadata matters to both the artist and the consumer, as you experienced yourself. I feel the need to shamelessly chime in with this because of how random this is, seeing our name on Hacker News: I'm one of the founding guitarists of VERIDIA and yes, the music is rock.

wussboy 5y ago

It's such a nuisance in choral music as well. There are about 1 million canticles, by hundreds of composers, to hundreds of settings, sung by hundreds of choirs, scattered across hundreds of albums. Good luck finding anything even slightly off the beaten path.

comprev 5y ago

Working on this problem of spellings (including non-Latin alphabet versions) was super interesting.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Ah. Well, they're all the same person. Or rather... the same persona. So we know they're a unique person... or persona. But what is identity anyway? What do I mean? Richard David James went by several different aliases. They're all the same person. But not the same persona? Maybe. Couldn't Pac-Mac by Power Pill just be considered Aphex Twin's work? I'd argue, sure. But Brad Strider's work, which is really just Richard again, is in my opinion significant enough from the rest of his work, can you group them together? Discogs still does, and that makes sense to me.

forrestthewoods 5y ago

You are so painfully correct. I wish I knew Primephonic existed because I would have subscribed! If Apple does this well it could be enough to get me to switch from Spotify to Apple Music. I am not optimistic though.

nxpnsv 5y ago

Ha, I’d write ‘Tjajkovskij’ in Swedish and ‘Tschaikowski’ in German, so i guess there are even more variations…

snthd 5y ago

It's a metadata/economics problem. One solution is to use musicbrainz, and contribute as you go. https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc6bc8be9 https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9ddd7abc-9e1b-471d-8031-583bc... https://musicbrainz.org/work/80737426-8ef3-3a9c-a3a6-9507afb93e93 https://musicbrainz.org/work/80737426-8ef3-3a9c-a3a6-9507afb...

wussboy 5y ago
Many years ago I was a huge fan of Music Brainz. I found a mis-named album info one time, submitted a request with changes to correct them, was rejected out of hand for an innocuous reason, and never went back. Which is too bad. As an idea and as a model, I love it. But you need the right culture/tool as well.
- corin_ 5y ago
  I know nothing about Music Brainz, but isn't it inevitable that something with humans involved will sometimes have errors? Is there such a thing as a restaurant that doesn't sometimes get a customer's order wrong, or a team of website moderators (paid or unpaid) who don't occasionally make the wrong judgement call, or a piece of software that occasionally had a bug that wasn't spotted in QA? To go from being a "huge fan" to refusing to use it after a single mistake seems a very extreme reaction, unless that incident caused you to look into it more and discover that they're constantly making similar mistakes. For something like restaurants there's often enough competing options to let a single mistake sour you to a place and choose alternatives in the future, but even then it a restaurant I was a huge fan of messed up a visit of mine I'd most likely give them another chance unless they literally didn't care care that something had gone wrong suggesting it's likely to keep happening. edit: Also curious about what their rejection reason was that led you to describe it as "innocuous", seems an odd adjective to include without context.
jeffbee 5y ago
MusicBrainz Picard is the thing that rewrote all of my Russian composers in Cyrillic and after that I was never able to find any of them ever again.

wcerfgba 5y ago

I find jazz has a similar problem: there may be a band leader but usually each instrumentalist is of note, and there is no way I am aware of to track each performer in an ID3 or APE tag. Consider for example the Cannonball Adderley album "Somethin' Else" [1]. The album artist is Cannonball because he led the session, but he is in no way the 'author' of the entire album. The performances of Miles, Hank, Sam and Art on their respective instruments are what make the album what it is. In addition, some of the tunes are 'standards': "Autumn Leaves" is by Kosma and "Love for Sale" is by Porter, although I suppose this info could be stored in the ID3 composer field on each track. I would love a way to track performers across all my jazz albums and be able to see which albums different people performed on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin%27_Else_(Cannonball_Adderley_album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin%27_Else_(Cannonball_A...

gvurrdon 5y ago
I very much agree; particularly as I may wish to hear particular bassists and they are usually not listed as the band leader. It would also be useful to able to add multiple tags, both "jazz" and "post bop", for example.
wcunning 5y ago
I've found similar problems with a bunch of group names. For instance, I want to listen to more Gerry Mulligan, specifically Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band, which had a Complete Verve recordings album that I got from the jazz collection at my university's music school, but Spotify and Apple do not have. They did several other albums and Mulligan had other groups (trios, quartets, etc) but they're hard to correlate together. Many of the jazz greats were in the boat where they performed on a lot of things that wouldn't list them as primary artists, but that's how you need to find them to find 95% of their work -- especially in instruments like my favorite: trombone. Band leader vs band members doesn't even have an ID3 field to the best of my knowledge without just sticking them all into the artist field. Compound that with the amount of jazz out there in the no-copyright state (because of age or racism or both in the distant past) that only exists in a collector's collection as a 45rpm stamping with low-ish quality and it turns out that there's a lot of missing music from pre-1950 or so.
5y ago

crazygringo 5y ago

Yup. What I really want is to be able to browse by composer, then work, and then show me all the performances (regardless of whether a whole album or part of an album), and let be sort/filter by popularity, trending, new, and performer. I'm honestly pretty surprised the metadata problem hasn't been solved by now. Even if the labels are providing it in an inconsistent format, cleaning it all up to 99.9% consistency seems like it could be done fairly efficiently. The universe of the names of classical composers and performers isn't that large.

isolli 5y ago
Have you tried Idagio? As a longtime user, I believe it would address your needs rather well. https://www.idagio.com/ https://www.idagio.com/

motoboi 5y ago

All I really wanted was being able to see the full name of the piece when I open an album in Spotify.

true_religion 5y ago

Tragedy of the commons. Since no one owns the tracks anyone can use any valid way of indicating the artists name. No one except the platform actually has the right to merge artist names together when the artist is out of copyright.

mtalantikite 5y ago

Similarly, browsing for Jazz (and some other genres) on streaming services really killed the main way I learned about music growing up. Usually you'd look at an album's liner notes, see who was playing what instrument, and go find more records that that person played on. To give an example, I might have been listening to John Coltrane's Blue Train record, really loved the trumpet player, and have gone and found some Lee Morgan records. I hate to admit it, but Spotify has made me lazy when it comes to music discovery, to the point where the only way I get excited to find new things is by digging for vinyl at a record store. The services feel built for passive entertainment consumption, not discovering and learning about new art.

asplake 5y ago
Funny, for me it has been the opposite. Spotify plus Google plus Wikipedia has been awesome.
crtasm 5y ago
I wonder if there's anything that ties in data from Discogs to what you're playing on Spotify, think that'd make a difference? I realise it'd be prone to incorrect matches.

montenegrohugo 5y ago

Such an enlightening comment. This is why I come back to HN, I had no idea why it was so hard to discover classical music (and I've experienced that pain point myself)

fishywang 5y ago

I remembered stumped onto an Amsterdam based classical music streaming service a few weeks ago that has a landing page explaining why they do per-second streaming subscription fee share with artists instead of the per-track share, which I think also makes a lot of sense for classical music. Some googling seems to suggest that's Primephonic but I'm not 100% sure about it (since they took down all their pages).

fishywang 5y ago
Yes it was Primephonic, found the page on wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042145/https://www.primephonic.com/payout-model https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042145/https://www.prime...

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jeffbee 5y ago

The way voice assistants behave with classical metadata is just terrible, too. Once I naively asked Android Auto to play Act II from Carmen, and it proceeded to recite all of the metadata from the record, which went one for a good solid minute. "OK, playing 'Act 2, Chanson, "Halte-là! Qui va là?", by Georges Bizet, José Carreras & Claudine Coster & Isabelle Karajan & Alain Hitier & Maria Laborit & Berliner Philharmoniker & Herbert von Karajan & Georges Bizet ..." It was just endless!

rodgerd 5y ago

> Where an app may have an "artist" field, classical music will have "composer" and then for the performers it will have "orchestra", "conductor", "principal soloists". For an opera all of those are primary fields that could be considered "artist". Yeah, this is maddening. Although in many ways it's not isolated to classical - the whole standards for tagging and the presentation thereof are woefully inadequate for any case where you want to be able to have a soloist or multiple composers but be able to find the same composer/songwriter regardless of who they've worked with, or featured artists in hiphop, or... I can understand that back in the MP3 days of the late 90s/early years of the century it was "a good start" but the lack of any meaningful improvements is woeful.

koyote 5y ago

Back in the good old days of mp3s I decided I wanted my library to be as 'accurate' as possible with its metadata. I spent a lot of time manually editing metadata. Tchaikovsky was stored as 'Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский'. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad idea on many levels: * No searching * Always ends up on the top/bottom of alphabetically sorted lists * Took much longer to work out which artist it was because I'm not fluent in Cyrillic * The Microsoft Zune's fonts did not support most non-ASCII characters (this was a big one!) That being said, I was young and it looked cool, so I kept it :)

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kalleboo 5y ago
I did the same thing back in the day in iTunes with Japanese artists etc. But iTunes had comment and "Sort Artist" and "Sort Title" fields that solved your first 2 problems and the iPod supports the same set of unicode as the Mac, so it worked out pretty well. It also helped teach me Japanese! People complained about the bloat in iTunes, but at times all those features did come in handy! I'll miss the depth of features once Apple finally ends up replacing the Mac music app with a port of the dumbed-down streaming service they have on iOS.
- needle0 5y ago
  The iTunes service/app in Japan also has a bad habit of automatically converting western artist names into their Japanese transliterated equivalents (eg. Billy Joel → ビリー・ジョエル) despite me not asking for it. Some tracks in your library would get the metadata converted while some other tracks (probably ones ripped from CDs not found in iTunes Match's database) stay as-is, hence both notations end up in the database, making a mess. Really wish it wouldn't do that.
  - tasogare 5y ago
    I hate when automatic translation is creeping into software or websites without a way to stop it. In particular since a few month youtube decided it was ok to list video on its home page with translated titles. As I browse videos in 3/4 languages, it became hard to know what language a video will be it. I did some change on language preferences in my account but it didn't really solve the problem.

lmm 5y ago

Correctly naming performers in different writing systems is just as difficult for non-Classical genres. E.g. this week I listened to a track whose title was given (on Amazon) as "Set The Fire To The Third Bar [feat. マーザ・ウィンライト]".

isolli 5y ago

> I'm really glad someone is investing in this A lot of companies have been investing in this for a while now. Primephonic (which Apple just bought) is only one example. I use Idagio, and I'm very impressed with the quality of the metadata and the search function.