Keith, have you had a look at Idagio
I have the free subscription with 192kbps MP3 encoding because I am still trialling it. Positives:
- Library is quite extensive and includes many obscure recordings. However, not all recordings are available, e.g. Stockhausen Helikopter-Streichquartette, Mahler's 6th Symphony by Horenstein are a couple I have found. Sometimes, well known recordings are not available (might be a license issue?) e.g. Carlos Kleiber's Beethoven 7 with the Bavarian State Orchestra, on the Orfeo label.
- Even the 192kbps MP3 sounds quite good. I have not tried lossless streaming yet.
Negatives:
- That search function does not always put your search at the top. For example, doing a search for "Wagner Ring Solti" does not display the correct album at the top. In fact, the first 5 suggestions are not Solti, and 2 of them are not performances of The Ring. The search function is contaminated by a bunch of recordings irrelevant to your search. You have to get to no. 5 before you find the correct album:
In this example, I searched for Julia Fischer's album for the complete recordings of Bach's Violin Sonatas. The top result was for a single violin sonata.
The rest of the albums are irrelevant to the search, and you have to ask yourself why it saw fit to place Benjamin Britten as the top album, even though it does not contain ANY of the key words except for a singer named Bach. If you click on the top sonata to begin playing, you will see this:
They have the correct album!! And for some reason, did not see fit to list it!
- Some albums have wrong tags. For example, Powaqqatsi does NOT have Gustavo Dudamel as a conductor. The conductor was Michael Riesman.
- The app for Android has no way to control the app on the PC. This is a problem if you are using your PC to listen to music and you want a remote control. Yes, you can use your phone to cast music on to your PC for playback, but that requires you to purchase a Chromecast device for your PC, and you will not be able to control your music from the PC. Your PC then becomes like a CD player without any buttons and you can only control it from your remote. The alternative is to launch the app and playback on your PC, in which case it acts like a CD player with buttons but without a remote.
- Offline listening has the same problem as all other streaming platforms. It saves it in a proprietary format, which you can not find on your device. It would be much better if they let you purchase the FLAC so that you can use it with any software you like. I can understand why they do this though, it might have something to do with their licensing agreement. But to me as a consumer, this kind of limitation smacks of the bad old days of DRM all over again.
- No DSD. If you want DSD, you have to buy it from a store that offers DSD downloads. This problem is not Idagio specific, I do not think any streaming service has DSD (correct me if I am wrong). I am not going to mark them down too harshly for this one, but it would be nice if they had a store where you could purchase additional high quality content if you desired.
Overall Idagio is the best classical streaming platform on the market ever since Primephonic was bought by Apple, and there is no way I would touch Apple anything or give them a cent of my money. I have looked at the alternatives (Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer) and they all have very serious strikes against them if you are a classical music listener - namely their collections are inadequate. My complaints are minor but I would like them to fix their search (after all, it is the prime way most listeners will interact with their program) and write a proper remote control for Android.