Apple Music Classical is now available for pre-order on the App Store
On March 9, the Apple Music Classical app was made available on the App Store, and the app will be officially released on March 28. The new Apple Music Classical app is said to offer Apple Music subscribers access to more than 5 million classical tracks – including high-quality audio from new releases, hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, as well as composer biographies and in-depth work explorations and more.
Apple also said, “The Apple Music Classical app has an easy-to-use interface that allows users to search for classical music by composer, work, conductor or through a chronological numbering system, and can be played at up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless quality, with some classical music supporting Dolby Atoms Panorama Sound”. In addition, users can read editorial notes about composers and their major works to understand their background and history. apple also provides users with a high-definition digital portrait created by the artist that will correspond to a specific classical period in tone and artistic style.
Spotify is redesigning the user interface
Spotify is redesigning its user interface with a new content preview feature. This feature uses video to present personalized recommendations for songs, playlists and albums. The podcast section has also been reorganized to offer podcast recommendations in video format at the top, allowing users to watch short video clips. Personalized recommendations have been added to the Audiobooks center, with a 5-minute preview period. Audiobook previews are currently limited to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, while music and podcast previews are available worldwide.
New developments in Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard
On March 9, Microsoft filed a document with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority that reveals some of the details of the Call of Duty game running on the Nintendo Switch. The document states that the Warzone game engine “has been optimized and can run on a variety of hardware devices” – including not only the Switch but also the Xbox One and GPU, which launched in 2015.
Microsoft added: “Activision has a ‘long history of optimizing the performance of games with available hardware features’ and believes it can optimize the means to bring graphics-intensive games such as Call of Duty to the Switch platform. While the graphics on the Switch may not match those of the newer consoles, players can play these games on Nintendo platforms.” Finally, Microsoft said the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard acquisition can be approved and Microsoft will soon release Call of Duty games on the Switch platform.
Microsoft has offered Sony a 10-year agreement for Call of Duty, but Sony believes that “Microsoft may raise the price of Call of Duty so that its users will choose the version on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service whenever possible, or even intentionally or unintentionally reduce the quality and performance of Call of Duty on PlayStation. Sony has therefore not yet signed the agreement.
The deal will be subject to a final ruling by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority by April 26. It has also been reported that EU regulators may approve the $68.7 billion deal for Microsoft.
On March 9, according to Reuters, Google is stepping up its pursuit of generative AI technology to counteract competition from the ChatGPT software from startup OpenAI. Google executives have now announced a “code red” plan that calls for all major products with more than 1 billion users to integrate generative AI technology within a few months.