Linked List: April 8, 2023

Saturday, 8 April 2023

Kirk McElhearn: ‘Apple Music Classical (Mostly) Plays the Right Chords’ ★

Kirk McElhearn has a comprehensive review of the new Apple Music Classical app/catalog at TidBITS:

Due to the way classical works have been cataloged over time, many of their names are unique, at least for the most famous composers. Schubert’s compositions are cataloged according to the work of Otto Erich Deutsch, hence the D before work numbers. Bach’s works have BWV numbers, for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or Bach works catalog. For other composers, opus numbers are used, referring to a specific publication. So for Beethoven, we have Op. 26: Piano Sonata No. 12 in A♭ major, which is a single piano sonata, and Op. 27, which contains two piano sonatas, No. 1: Piano Sonata No. 13 in E♭ major, and No. 2: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor, also known as the Moonlight Sonata.

The point of this somewhat lengthy preamble is to explain why searching for classical music is so much more complicated than searching for popular music. You may want to listen to a specific work by a given composer, but also by one of your favorite performers. And, as you can see with the example of the Schubert sonata, work names are not always as simple as Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Metadata is the key to managing classical music.

I’ve seen some people wondering if Apple Music Classical is the first step toward per-genre apps: Apple Music Rock, Apple Music Rap, Apple Music Jazz, etc. That’s almost certainly not going to happen. Classical music is different, because it doesn’t fit in the simple categorization of artist → album → song. Classical music demands different and more metadata attached to the music, and a different interface for browsing, discovering, and managing that music.

One seemingly weird thing about Apple Music Classical: it’s iPhone-only for now. McElhearn writes:

It also seems like it should be trivial to add Apple Music Classical to the Music app on the desktop. Adding a sidebar entry would not change the interface much, and since all of the content in the Apple Music Classical app is HTML, the Music app would have no problem displaying it. It’s the exact same type of content that Apple Music uses.

All this makes the Apple Music Classical app seem like an experiment. It’s quite polished for a 1.0 release, and, despite the issues that I’ve mentioned above that will irritate classical music fans, it’s a generally successful attempt to provide a better way to access classical music. Apple should be praised for paying so much attention to a genre that represents only 2–3% of the overall music market.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko With Nilay Patel on Decoder ★

Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge:

Now, if you are like me, you hear the words “open source” and “decentralized” and then the word “CEO” and think, wait, why does the decentralized open standard have a CEO? The whole point is that no single person or company is in charge, right? Well, welcome to the wild world of open-source governance. It’s a riot, my friends. You’re going to hear me and Eugen say the phrase “benevolent dictator for life” in dead seriousness because that’s how a lot of these projects are run.

Of course, we also talk about money and structure. Mastodon doesn’t make a lot of money, and Eugen is figuring out how to build a structure that scales past just a handful of people. This tiny and mostly volunteer labor of love might very well be the future of social networking and, if you believe the hype about ActivityPub, might have some part in the future of the web. That’s pretty exciting, even if things seem a little messy in the moment.

Terrific interview. Mastodon is thriving and has a bright future, but the nature of social networks makes it so hard to predict what that future is.

Easter Egg of the Week: The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Recent Versions of MacOS ★

Andy Baio:

If you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview. […]

Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it’s only 184 KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.

There’s virtually nothing about this online. As of this moment, there are only a couple references to “Virtual Driver II” or the whitepaper file in Google results. Namely, this Twitter thread from designer Joshua Dickens in November 2020, who also spotted the whitepaper PDF, inspiring this Apple Community post in April 2021. And that’s it!

What a weird curiosity this hidden document is. I’d wager that now that Baio has written about it, it’ll get replaced with something innocuous soon — if not in MacOS 13.4, then in MacOS 14. Perhaps a transcript of Apple’s famous “Think Different” commercial? (That’s the text Apple uses for the document icon for TextEdit’s text files.)