Primephonic
There’s plenty of classical music here to interest and excite you
£9.99/month (Premium); £14.99/month (Platinum) FROM Primephonic, primephonic.com
NEEDS iOS 11 or later
Primephonic is a classical music streaming service with over 3.5 million tracks – from brand new or lesser-known artists and composers to, ahem, the classics. So, if your musical leanings incline more toward Berlioz than Bieber, this could be the app for you.
You can listen to Primephonic in one of three ways: in the dedicated app for iOS and iPadOS; via its online web player or by adding it through a third-party app such as the Sonos Controller. There’s a 14-day free trial; after that it’s £9.99/month for the Premium tier, which streams tracks in 320kbps MP3, or £14.99/ month for the Platinum tier, which offers Lossless 24-bit FLAC streaming. You can also download and listen to tracks offline.
On iPhone and iPad, the app seems almost familiar – there’s a definitely an Apple Music feel here, with curated radio stations and playlists, exclusive interviews and podcasts, and musical categories based around things like genre, period and ambience – so if you want something ‘Dreamy’, ‘Intense’ or ‘Tragic’, Primephonic has a radio station just for you.
Like Apple Music, the Primephonic app is something of a mixed bag. The app is so packed with content, it can feel a little overwhelming, while Search doesn’t always quite reveal the results you expect – it mashes up composer John Williams with guitarist John Williams, for example. Neither the iPad or iPhone versions of the app are optimised for landscape mode – instead you simply get a somewhat truncated version of the portrait view.
Mange tout, Rodney
The best way to get your head around it is to simply pick a genre, composer or artist you like, tap Play and then take a deep dive into what’s on offer. You can easily add tracks to your Favourites as you go along, and create your own custom playlists.
As for playback – we had no problems streaming content at the highest quality to an AirPlay 2 speaker on our network, although the sound did drop out on occasion. Invoking AirPlay is a little more convoluted than it could be, though. You have to make a selection, open the playback windows, tap ‘Playback devices’, then select where you want to listen to from a list – it would be great if you could just do so from the home screen by tapping the three-dots icon to the right of each track, but it’s simply not one of the options listed.
It’s hard to fault the service though – whether you’re a seasoned classical music lover or just setting out on your voyage of musical discovery, there’s plenty here to interest and excite you – from Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra in A Minor, Op 60 by Brahms to the World’s Greatest TV Themes. Yes, the theme from Only Fools And Horses is on here too…