IDAGIO Stream Classical Music 4+

I’ve never left an app review. Until now. I wouldn’t say Idagio has changed my life, but it has come pretty close. My work as a musician has flourished with this tool. I’ve discovered volumes of work in the past year with this app. 1) The sheer volume of material is literally bottomless. 2) The quality of material is outstanding. From the best recordings of classical music’s best to the curated playlists, the selection is great. If I wanted to search the Chaconne in D Minor and compare soloists such as Hahn or Perlman, this is your tool. 3) Subscription options are numerous. I’ve recently upgraded my subscription to Lossless quality and am quite sure I’ll never go back to a lesser quality. 4) It’s a beautiful app. 5) The Christmas playlists are hands-down the best Christmas music you will ever find. From ancient medieval chorales, to Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, to Ludovico Einaudi, this app will (almost!) change your life.

IDAGIO is a *fantastic* service, but this app needs work — a lot if it. It’s stable, so it doesn’t crash, which reality matters. But the user interface is lacking, and the user experience is worse. For example, when I use it with a Sonos system, the IDAGIO app forgets that it’s playing music — so there's no way to pause / stop the music (I have to use Sonos), identity what's playing (same or, worse, Shazam?!), or even just change the volume (and the app doesn’t respond to the volume buttons on an iPhone, so you have to use the slider buried behind the AirPlay icon). The app’s screen is consumed by fairly static rows of offerings (do we *really* need it to recommend Bach or Vivaldi every time we open it?), instead of dynamic presentations of what you’ve listened to or might like. In fact, accessing what you’ve listened to / like / etc is consistently difficult, as if it were a design goal — it always takes too many steps, and the way things are presented is always disappointing). But IDAGIO is an amazing service, their app basically works, and I want to support them, so four stars. They could do SO MUCH to make this a genuinely transformative app. I hope they do.

The idea of classical focus streaming is good and I like the way I can search recordings by composers, soloists, ensembles and many criterion that none of the other popular streaming services can match. The lossless streaming is also nice.

However, the connection issues are very annoying. Usually, after a couple skips to find the right music for the moment, the app will be stuck at time zero, with the loading/connecting icon spinning forever. Once this happens, you will not be able to play any other work as they will also be “non-starters”. Only killing (swipe up in iOS) and restarting the app could fix this. Also, the music might suddenly stop in the middle of a piece for no apparent reason sometimes.

Also, as someone already mentioned, there is no easy way you can see the album cover when you are playing the music. The only time the app shows the album cover is when you actually play the “album” instead of a piece you located through search. I am not sure about future generations but most of us today still identify certain recordings by the album covers. There is no point showing the same Beethoven’s portrait when I go through his piano sonatas from various performers.