This is a great development, and Gramophone remains a wonderful source of curated greatness.
Does that work for the sections on re-issues, or best recordings of a work? If so, that really is great. I am keen to support new artists, but there are classics from times gone that are hard to find and harder to beat.
More worrying though is the way all streaming services just seem to ‘delete’ albums whether favourited or not. Huge swathes of Karajan’s opera recordings; gone.
What? Do you mean they disappeared from the server ? Scary…
At the moment it is just for the recordings of the month and some other reviews in the digital magazine, and for their “xx best recordings of year” on the website. I think in the past there were more links (but in those days to Qobuz) in the magazine. Gramophones review archive has to be one of the greatest resources for recorded classical music; how wonderful it would be to link it to a streaming service. I would pay good money for that.
Apple has purchased all the rights for a huge library of existing music, of which many historical recordings for which they are able to take the original multiple tracks of master tapes and can remap them into Dolby Atmos format. So they have already started to repropose great stuff… But the original stereo files should not be deleted, though…
Files that have disappeared could be part of the “long tail”, meaning files that are rarely if ever played. It would be interesting to hear who decides on keeping them on the servers, the rights holder or the streaming service. It can be imagined that files should generate some level of income stream in order to justify the cost of storage.
Dolby Atmos is still in very early days. There aren’t well-defined, well-accepted “mappings” since it is object based. There have been a lot of complaints about quality and odd sound stage effects in the Atmos releases on Apple.
That’s quite a statement. I know it’s popular and fun to trash Apple, but I will show you one example where you are wrong.
Here is a list of Apple’s M&A activity:
Steve Jobs passed in Oct 2011. Look at that list and see an acquisition in 2014 of Burstly. TestFlight integration into Apple has made structured alpha and beta testing of apps very clean and easy, compared to doing something similar on Android. And, Apple didn’t ‘wreck it’ after the acquisition and I would say it helped everyone in the App Store eco-system.
I’m sure there are many more examples of acquisitions that helped Apple’s customers.
As for Primephonic, I was an early adopter and have raved about their unique UX for browsing and discovering classical music. In fact, I have submitted a number of posts on this forum begging Roon to copy the best parts of their UI.
But you know what? I cancelled my subscription to Primephonic because their app was sub-par (that’s an understatement), making its use in the office and in the car very frustrating.
Apple will take this acquisition, throw a pile of $$$ and developers at it, and build a best-in-class app that will combine Apple Music with the catalog additions and browsing/discovery innovations from Primephonic.
Apple haters gonna hate, whatever. As a platform agnostic, I use the best of everything for my needs. This move from Apple has all the signs of making it into my collection, but I’m gonna wait and see the product before making silly pronouncements about it.
Not silly, no hate just based on past form and experience when Apple buy other software companies.
Some interesting developments in the Gramophone’s Awards Shortlist, from our friends at Apple…
Spatial Audio now a category! Apple’s ambitions appear to be way beyond Primephonic. Is this the first time a format has become an awards category?
Completely unrelated to this topic, but now I’m wondering why Gramophone is not included in the Apple News+ offer of magazines?
This pages you’re sharing look almost like a partnership to me… Having unlimited access to Gramophone would make the “Apple Classical” package even more appealing 
Exactly! I am not sure whether to feel concerned or relieved that some new money is coming into the space. For years now, the big labels (Warner, DG, Decca, Sony) have not released many new recordings…could this invigorate the classical world?
That makes absolutely no business sense whatsoever.
Good soundbite though…
Spatial audio isn’t really a format. It’s a general descriptive term like immersive audio, that researchers are working on acceptable definitions for. It would encompass the various forms of multichannel, from single layer surround (5.1) to inclusion of height channels to object-based recording like Atmos. And then to recording and speaker arrays from 7.1 to 22.2. And IR/VR which often includes synthesized sounds. And then there are the binaural mix-downs of all of them.
Gramaphone could use it to mean multichannel realeased in any form, e.g. Bluray. Or could also include binaural mixes.
Ummm no, it doesn’t appear you’ve followed Apple Music news so far in 2021.
I can’t speak on the entire 70+ million library but I’ve personally found more faux hi-rez on Qobuz than Apple Music (especially the Apple Music Digital Master Hi-Res content)
Qobuz have just emailed me saying they’ve lowered their prices. Competition seems to be intensifying.
In the end, those with the deepest pockets will be left standing, unfortunately.
That’s true and the artists will likely get less back as a result.
Unfortunately, having read that particular issue of the Gramophone, I have no clue as to what they mean. They seem to be applying it to bog-standard stereo CD releases as well as Blu-ray videos. Which leads me to suspect that what they actually mean are albums that have been made available in Dolby Atmos format in Apple Music…
Very helpful point, and it highlights for me that whether surround sound, stereo or even mono versions, all are a product of a mixing process? I have found myself thinking alot about the old question in ‘High Fidelity’ of ‘fidelity to what?’ when people speak of accuracy of say PCM versus MQA.
Still, as a brand, Gramophone do seem to be behind Spatial Audio.
Indeed.
