IDAGIO - For Classical Music Lovers

[Bob Stern]

On 10/1/2018 at 9:01 AM, rodrigaj said:

It appears that streaming is at 320kbps and redbook levels are at a premium price.

 

I haven’t started the 14-day trial yet, but their FAQ only reveals one tier, 10€/month.  I just emailed them to request clarification of the word "from" on this page:

https://support.idagio.com/general-questions/how-much-does-idagio-cost

 

 

On 10/1/2018 at 9:01 AM, rodrigaj said:

BT, Airplay, Chromecast only.

 

They have Mac and Windows desktop apps here:

https://www.idagio.com/download

[Bob Stern]

On 10/1/2018 at 9:01 AM, rodrigaj said:

It appears that streaming is at 320kbps and redbook levels are at a premium price.

 

I just exchanged emails with Lukas, one of the two customer service reps who authored some of the FAQ articles.  He clarified that the advertised 10€/month subscription includes all quality levels, including lossless redbook streaming.  There is no premium or higher cost plan.

 

There is an annual subscription rate that's cheaper than the advertised monthly rate, but he didn’t tell me what the annual rate was.  He said the annual rate was not available yet for iOS.

[Bob Stern]

Idagio may have a much more extensive selection of classical recordings than Qobuz.

 

As a quick test, I searched for Brahms op 51 on both platforms.

 

Qobuz UK returned 17 albums:  12 albums with both op 51 quartets, 3 with only op 51/1, and 2 with only op 52/2.

 

Idagio returned recordings of op 51/1 by 31 different ensembles, and op 51/2 by 28 ensembles.  Here's a list of their op 51/1 recordings:

[Bob Stern]

1 hour ago, mkozlows said:

I have Filmstruck for arthouse/classic movies and Netflix for other stuff.

 

I subscribed to Filmstruck for a few months about 2 years ago, but they had very few movies from the last 30 years.  Netflix DVD has been a much better source for recent "art house" movies.  Has Filmstruck added movies in the latter category that you specifically recommend?  A quick glance at the "newly added" section of their website is not encouraging.

 

(Apologies to the OP for veering egregiously OT.)

[Bob Stern]

2 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

Spotify Premium / Connect has a lot more content than IDAGIO regardless of genre - including classical.

 

What are examples of albums on Spotify that are not on Idagio?

 

I find that for classical music out of the mainstream, Idagio has a surprisingly extensive library.

 

For example, compared with Spotify, Idagio has over twice as many works by composer David Diamond.  Spotify has none of his chamber works at all.

 

Hindemith's "Ludus Tonalis":  Spotify has 4 recordings, Idagio has 10.

 

Barber's "Knoxville":  Spotify 4, Idagio 11.

 

OTOH, Idagio has a minuscule selection of Italian opera.

[Bob Stern]

1 hour ago, rodrigaj said:

have you found that if you save favorites on say the iPad App that it does not appear on your desktop app?

 

If you buy me an iPad, I'll test it!

 

I do find that favorites (what they call "collections") and playlists are properly saved and shared between the Mac desktop app and web browser.  

 

The confusing aspect is that your "Collection" is divided into 3 sub-groups for tracks, recordings and albums, respectively, and you cannot view all 3 sub-groups together.  That's dumb, but presumably easy for them to fix.

[Bob Stern]

1 hour ago, rodrigaj said:

if you search for "Artist" (as in performer) instead of "Composer/Composition" (as in Beethoven Sonatas) you hit the motherload.

 

I don’t think that's necessary.  I tried searching "Beethoven piano sonata".  I got a list of works, i.e., each individual sonata.  I then selected one of them, nr. 26 (op. 81).  This yielded a list of 60 soloists on the left.  That's a lot!

 

However, a serious problem is that the recording date usually is not specified, but rather a copyright date, and the latter is often bizarrely unrelated to the recording date, including very recent copyright dates for performers who are deceased or retired.  This is especially confusing for artists who recorded the same work multiple times over there careers.

[Bob Stern]

6 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

When I type in "Beethoven piano sonata" on my iMac desktop app or the browser page, I don't get anywhere near the results you are getting. Specifically, 2 top results, 48 compositions, 30 albums, 1 playlist. More importantly, neither the Paul Lewis or Annie Fischer albums that I mentioned before are listed.

 

Did you skip the step of selecting ONE of the sonatas from the list of 48 compositions?  It won’t display all recordings until you select a single composition.

[Bob Stern]

7 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

But no link to the albums from which they come from. The album list is totally not representative of what their library has to offer.

 

Yes, the absence of album links is extremely frustrating.

 

Also, many works appear separately as "recordings" but not as part of their albums.  For example, the recent Gergiev album of Stravinsky's Petrushka and Fireworks on the Mariinsky label appears under its two compositions, but the album itself does not appear anywhere, no matter how you search.

[Bob Stern]

4 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

To those folks using Chromecast, has the lack of gapless playback been fixed?

 

The Mac desktop app cannot play gaplessly either.

[Bob Stern]

6 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

Dealbreaker.

 

I think that's an over-reaction.  The vast majority of non-operatic classical music has pauses between movements.  Even for the minority of music that is continuous between tracks — such as Petrushka mentioned above, Daphnis & Chloe, or Mahler's 8th — Idagio remains extremely useful to compare performances.

 

In any event, what is the alternative?  The other lossless classical streaming services, including Qobuz, have search functions that are just as frustrating as Idagio.

 

Since Idagio is half the price of Qobuz redbook streaming, it's a wonderful option.  I've enjoyed exploring music I've read positive reviews about but never heard before, such as Hindemith's "Ludus Tonalis".

[Bob Stern]

Recording Dates:  I just poked around in the Qobuz app.  (I have an account but not an active subscription.)  Like Idagio, most albums in Qobuz only show the publication date of the latest reissue/repackaging, not the recording date, so it's often impossible to figure out which repackagings correspond to which of the multiple recordings made by an artist over their long career.

 

Search:  I tried searching for Beethoven's sonata 30, op 109, by Barenboim.  I couldn’t find it at all in the Qobuz Mac desktop app, although they must have it.  In Idagio I found two versions with copyright dates of 2006 and 2013.  The 2006 is his recent recording in the Beethoven for All series.  I have no idea when the 2013 version actually was recorded.  The timings are different from his 1984 complete sonatas on CD.

[Bob Stern]

The Mac app still won’t play gapless.  However, the vast majority of streaming subscribers use Android and iOS devices, so they may be focussing their development on those platforms.

 

I love Idagio because I like being able to "drill down" to artists via text menus instead of squinting at album covers as in Qobuz.

[Bob Stern]

7 hours ago, Jim Sylva said:

Has anyone else checked out Idagio lately? I'm interested in what other people think about the present format.

 

Are you a subscriber?  What do you want to know?

[Bob Stern]

3 minutes ago, Jim Sylva said:

[Idagio] is the only service I have used that seems to acknowledge the specific additional metadata required to perform meaningful searches and retrievals in the realm of classical music.

 

Quite true.  Also of tremendous value: Idagio has a vastly deeper catalog than other classical streaming services, as I mentioned in Post 12 above.  Qobuz seems best if you are focussed primarily on brand new releases, but Idagio is vastly better if you want to compare multiple performances of a work.

 

I don’t find Idagio's interface unattractive at all.  I strongly prefer its emphasis on text-based results and the ability to drill down into search results by category, artist or composer.  

 

The album orientation of Qobuz displays lots of colorful album covers but is useless for drill down.  I find Qobuz works well only if you already know of one specific album you want to hear or if you want to peruse an assortment of recent releases.

[Bob Stern]

@rodrigaj You might try Rogue Amoeba "Airfoil" ($30) instead of the Airplay streamer built into Idagio.  

 

(The free trial version of Airfoil overlays noise every 10 minutes, so you'd have to keep relaunching it.  However, if you buy it they have a 14-day refund policy on a case-by-case basis.  If you explain you successfully tried the trial version but you need to test whether it overcomes the problem of dropouts over the long term, they may agree in advance that this would justify a refund if it doesn’t solve the problem.)

[Bob Stern]

The Roon+Qobuz example of Mozart's sym 38 shows one extremely valuable feature: the original recording date rather than the reissue date.  If Roon also has that data on most of the Qobuz catalog, even more obscure recordings, that would be wonderful.  Idagio has the original date for only a minority of its recordings.

 

fwiw, Roon lists 81 recordings of that symphony, whereas Idagio lists 62.  Again, it would be interesting to compare for less popular pieces.

 

When you say Roon+Qobuz, do you mean that all 81 recordings actually are available on Qobuz?  That's not consistent with my experience with the Qobuz website alone, without Roon.

[Bob Stern]

1 hour ago, mkozlows said:

Some of them wouldn't have come up in a Qobuz search, because the album titles are things like "Sweet Dreams - Baby's First Mozart vol. 2", but the relevant symphony is on that album.

 

In collections like that, only one movement would be included.  I hope Roon would show that it's only one movement rather than the entire symphony.

[Bob Stern]

2 hours ago, Jim Sylva said:

I have spent more time than I enjoy organizing my classical music, so I have been hesitant to pass the metadata on to Roon due to concerns about not liking the results.

 

Same here.  Roon seems like a bad solution if you don’t want to adopt Roon's default tagging.  If you expend the effort to edit tags in Roon to your liking, Roon stores them only in its own database, not in the music files.  If you later switch to a different music manager/database program, you lose all your customized tags.

 

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Editing_and_Grooming_Your_Collection#Can_I_use_Roon_to_groom_my_file_tags_

 

Another concern for me is that Roon has some issues when playing music through HQ Player, according to numerous posts on the HQ Player topics of this forum.

[Bob Stern]

Is there a version history for the desktop app?  It does NOT have gapless playback.

[Bob Stern]

2 minutes ago, rodrigaj said:

Idagio now offers a booklet view with their App and they have live video streams.

 

To clarify for the benefit of others:  Within the app, the newest albums have a link that opens the album booklet in PDF format in a web browser window, where you can view or download the PDF.  Since this is a new feature, most albums do not yet have booklets.

 

Where do you find video in the app?  I don’t see it.  I just updated the Mac app to version 0.0.118.