Apple, Idagio, Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal all have native macOS apps (in the case of Apple, this is also the operating system’s audio player, which allows you to include ripped CDs if you set it up correctly and buy some iCloud storage).

All* have web players for use on the desktop.

You can see a list of screenshots here.Īll six products have phone apps which permit you to download music for playing offline. I’ve shown the comparisons one topic at a time rather than trying to do a list of six comprehensive reviews. My method has been to set each service a number of tasks and see – after a bit of practise – how easy they were to accomplish. I’ll be considering some of the different ways in which classical and opera lovers might want to use these services and matching those needs against what they provide. As we’ll see, there are many different aspects to these services: their look and feel on the phone and the desktop, how you search, what audio quality they provide, their different ways of helping you choose what to listen to, and a number of special features. The other four, Apple Music, Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal, cover all genres. Two of them, Idagio and Primephonic, have been created specifically for classical music listeners. To help you find your way through the music streaming maze, I’ve looked at six of the available services. And classical music – particularly opera and large scale choral or symphonic works – has extremes of dynamic range and spectral detail which means that for discriminating listeners, highly compressed audio just doesn’t sound good enough.

Classical music doesn’t fit neatly into the “Artist / Album / Track” schema used by most of the download and streaming providers, so seeking a particular artist playing a given work is hard. For classical music and opera lovers, however, there have been two glaring snags: metadata and quality.

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