Apple has finally revealed the launch date for its standalone classical music app, Apple Music Classical. While it’s been delayed from its initial release timeline, the app will finally be available to download starting 28 March with pre-orders already open on the app store.

The app has been in the works since September 2021 with Apple’s acquisition of the classical music streaming app Primephonic. It was set to launch at the end of 2022 and although some code relating to the classical app was spotted in the Apple Music app last February, the tech giant was pretty quiet about the development in general.

Introducing Apple Music Classical, the new app designed specifically for classical music. Pre-order today on the @AppStore. https://t.co/lwnF4Dx4ua pic.twitter.com/F8uMKMVm2i

— Apple Music Classical (@AppleClassical) March 9, 2023

Apple Music Classical will offer “hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, intuitive browsing features, and much more.” It will stream at up to 192kHz/24-bit hi-res lossless and will include thousands of spatial audio recordings.

Just like Primephonic, the app it’s based on, the new app will offer thorough and accurate classical metadata. Users will be able to search “by composer, work, conductor, or even catalogue number, and find specific recordings instantly.”

apple music classical app — Image: Apple

Back when it was still Primephonic, its metadata was put together manually by its employees as the classical genre required specificity. It claimed to have the largest classical database in the world with over 3.5 million classical tracks from 170,000 artists across almost 230,000 albums and 2,400 labels.

Apple confirmed to The Verge that the app won’t feature offline downloads at launch. Additionally, it won’t be releasing a native iPad version and it’s unclear if there will also be a Mac version in the future.

Apple Music Classical will be exclusive to iOS at launch but the company stated that an Android version is “coming soon”, which wouldn’t be a surprise seeing as how the regular Music app is already available on Android. It will support iOS 15.4 and newer and be released worldwide except for China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, which will be coming later.

(Source: The Verge)