mufin

Mufin Music Player: A different kind of jukebox

When it comes to music software, there is one fact that's impossible to deny: There's no shortage of digital jukeboxes available for download. (Whether you like the choices is another matter entirely). As such, it's a special challenge for companies to get their offerings to stand out from the herd. Magix makes quite the impressive attempt with Mufin Music Player, though.

This handy music manager integrates a digital sound analyzer that aims to provide you with a list of songs similar to whichever track you select at any given moment. In other words, rather than using humans … Read more

Mufin Player organizes songs by sound

Earlier on Friday, Mufin launched its music player, which analyzes the songs in your music collection based on their audio content, rather than on human analysis or genre.

Human analysis, naturally, is subjective, and genre labeling is totally arbitrary and unreliable--I particularly hate the meaningless label "Alternative," which can apply to everything from dead-slow acoustic to fast punk; it's more about the hairstyles of the artists than the content of the music.

Once Mufin has analyzed your tunes, it can recommend similar-sounding songs from your collection. It also catalogs songs in its online database and can recommend … Read more

Mufin opens up with Facebook app and iTunes plug-in

Music search and recommendation tool Mufin is opening to everyone this morning. The service, which launched in private beta in early October, lets you find music that's similar to a track you know based on a scientific analysis of its composition.

New on Thursday is both a Facebook app and the previously mentioned iTunes plug-in that scans your library to give you recommendations. Unlike Apple's "Genius" analyzer system in iTunes, Mufin actually scans your tracks for relational relevance instead of giving you an aggregate hodge-podge of recommendations based on the playlists and purchases of iTunes users. … Read more

Mufin lets you discover new music with science

Launching in private beta on Wednesday is Mufin, a Berlin-based music discovery service that helps users find similar tracks based on identifiers within a song. It scans each track for its density, tempo, and rhythm, then draws comparisons with other songs that match. What you get is a system that lets you find similar tracks by sound, even if they cross multiple genres.

Last week I chatted with Petar Djekic, the service's marketing manager, about this process and its origins. What's interesting is that it's a spinoff from the technology that was created to identify songs from … Read more