Apple Music Classical is now available for download globally with more than 5 million tracks. Offered as part of an Apple Music subscription, it’s designed to make it easier to find things unique to classical music, including orchestras, conductors, musicians and more.
The app sprung from Primephonic, the streaming service Apple acquired in 2021. It was originally slated to be released at the end of 2022, but earlier this month, Apple revealed a firm release date of March 28th.
The app is available on iPhones running iOS 15.4 or later, with an Android version “coming soon.” As you’d hope, it offers 192KHz/24-bit high-resolution lossless audio quality, with “thousands” of recordings offered in spatial audio as well. It also lets classical enthusiasts browse composer biographies, descriptions of key works, “deep-dive” guides and more. The search feature has been rewritten for classical music queries and lets you choose from over 700 curated playlists.
There are few things missing from the main Apple Music app, though. Apple Music Voice Plan subscribers can’t use Classical, there’s no native iPad app yet and you can’t download music for offline listening. The navigation bar has just four buttons (Listen Now, Browse, Library and Search), as there’s no Radio shortcut. Apart from that, it should appeal to classical music lovers seeking things specific to the genre, especially those hard-to-locate performances.
