IDAGIO - For Classical Music Lovers

[mkozlows]

On 10/5/2018 at 4:51 AM, Bob Stern said:

 

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.

 

That might be true in Europe, but in the US, there's a $9.99/month plan at 320kbps, and a $14.99 plan for FLAC.

 

If you listen to a lot of classical music, though, I really recommend at least giving it a look-see. (You can do a free 1-day trial without even entering in your credit card info; there's apparently a 14-day free trial after that, that does require a credit card, and then you have to cancel it if you don't want it. But the 1-day thing is zero-hassle, just requires downloading the app.)

 

The lossless is great (and there'd be no point considering a niche service that didn't have lossless), but what really makes the service is how well organized the UI is for classical. It has "compositions" and "performances" as a fundamental first-level concept, and that just completely changes the game for finding things. Searching for "Tchaikovsky Symphony," instead of giving you a zillion albums back (or, even worse, 10 zillion randomly-ordered tracks), gives you back a short list of compositions. And when you go into a composition, you can see the conductor/ensemble/date for it (and soloist and instrument where applicable).

 

$15/month for an add-on service is a steep ask, but Idagio is just really solid for classical. (Being in the US, I can't compare it to Qobuz, so no idea how that stacks up.)

[mkozlows]

20 minutes ago, Musicophile said:

What's good about Qobuz is the fact that you have other genres as well, I'm quite into Jazz too so I'd feel limited by a classical only streaming service.

 

Yeah, I'm treating Idagio as an add-on service rather than a thing that will replace Google Music for me. Google Music still gets me the casual "hey google play whatever" stuff with the Google Home speakers, the Android Auto integration for when I'm driving, the wide selection of pop music. And meanwhile, Idagio gets me the audiophile sound quality, curation, and great UX for classical. It's kind of the same way I have Filmstruck for arthouse/classic movies and Netflix for other stuff.

 

Downside is, I'm paying $23/month for these two services (assuming I keep going past the trial period, which seems likely at the moment), but I guess that Qobuz's CD-quality service is $20, so this isn't really that much more -- and if Google Music is more convenient than Qobuz for casual use (which it almost certainly is, for someone like me who's got a lot of Google-ecosystem stuff around), and Idagio is better at classical (which it sounds like it might be), then that $3 premium seems totally reasonable.

 

(Also, they have an annual plan, which knocks a few bucks off the price; so that's a thing, too, if you're confident they'll last for a whole year.) 

[mkozlows]

6 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

Returning to Idagio, I can see myself keeping Spotify Premium / Connect for casual listening and Idagio for classical simply for the tagging value. Try searching for Mozart K504 on Spotify...what a mess. If Idagio can deal with that in a suitable manner I'm in.

 

Searching for "Mozart K504" doesn't work well, but "Mozart KV 504" returns that composition as its top result (followed by a bunch of CDs that will presumably have it somewhere in their track listing). If you click on that composition, you get a list of the performances, filterable by composer and ensemble.

 

 

Also, re the price, I was both right and wrong earlier: The $9.99/$14.99 split is what you get if you use the Android app, but on the web, you can subscribe to lossless quality for $9.99 straight-up. It sounds like they're moving in the direction of the Android-style pricing, but for the moment at least, you can still subscribe at the cheaper price via the web (which the support person I reached out to even suggested). 

[mkozlows]

4 hours ago, Jim Sylva said:

However, it 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.

 

I agree that's true of the services out-of-the-box, but Roon actually does a good job of this, too. Like, upthread, I posted a screenshot of Idagio's results when you search for "mozart kv 504". If you do that on Roon, you get a page that shows you artists, albums, tracks, and compositions that match. If you go into the compositions, this is what you see:

 

 

It's honestly even better in a lot of ways, giving you a little blurb about the work, and cover art for each of the albums that has a recording of it. 

 

The results there are from Qobuz; I found Roon + Qobuz to give a really solid combination of classical-browsing UX, selection (definitely found things that were missing on Idagio on Qobuz -- the Solti Ring cycle, the Gideon Kremer Tabula Rasa), and device compatibility: Roon works with basically everything, from dedicated kilobuck audiophile streamers to Raspberries Pi to Chromecasts to KEF's wireless speakers to Airplay devices. 

 

The Roon + Qobuz combo is expensive -- Qobuz lossless is $20/month, and Roon is another $10/month (payable in annual installments only) -- but all-in-all, I feel like it hits the marks that Idagio is aiming for, and more.

[mkozlows]

As far as I can tell, they're all on Qobuz, yeah. 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.

[mkozlows]

8 hours ago, Bob Stern said:

 

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.

 

I didn't see an indicator of that, but honestly, if you're browsing through a list of CDs containing a symphony, odds are that you're not spending too much time looking at the Baby Mozart stuff anyway...

 

Roon definitely isn't perfect, and I've seen cases where metadata got messed up, but (like Idagio) it does have the fundamental concept of a composition separate from albums, and lets you sort on the key metadata that's relevant to classical recordings, which puts it head and shoulders above any non-Idagio service.