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Find New Music with Mufin
February 27, 2009, 10:29 PM by ROB
Posted in REVIEWS, MEDIA, SOFTWARE | 338 views
Let's talk about Mufin. Not muffins of the banana nut or blueberry variety—Mufin.
Mufin is a "music discovery engine" that lets you find music that sounds similar to songs you already like. If you think that description sounds a lot like Pandora, you're exactly right. The basic premise is similar, but there is a laundry list of qualifying differences that makes Mufin a totally different beast.
Mufin comes in a variety of flavors... er... "packages." First is the web based interface, in which you can search for your favorite songs and artists and find tracks that are similar based upon rhythm, tempo, and density.
Next up is Mufin's new Mufin Player, which they deem the "World's first media player with sound-based music management and music discovery." The Mufin Player bring Mufin's web-based song-sniffing functionality to your desktop, then takes it one step further by analyzing your current tracks to sort them by how they sound.
Analyzing tracks, though, takes a painfully long time. When you first set up the software, you can import your iTunes library (or other music folders, for that matter) and begin analyzing that media. I imported 1554 songs from my iTunes library, which took around a half an hour to analyze. I'd hate to wait patiently for some of my friends' 10,000-song libraries to go through the process.
Another cool feature of the Mufin Player is Audio ID, which lets you use Mufin's analyzed data to identify songs without ID3 tags and save the updated tags automatically. I've tried it with a few of my tracks and, while it found most of them, there were a few that it wouldn't recognize.
If you don't want to use a whole new music player, you can always use Mufin's third option—Mufin for iTunes. It's not as elegant as the Mufin player, but it's a nice add-on to iTunes.
Mufin's greatest highlight, I think, is also its greatest flaw. Since Mufin uses computer algorithms to compare tracks, it can be just a little off. Sorry, Mufin. I don't see the link between Johnny Cash and Linkin Park. Pandora's accuracy is eerie—they hit most correlations right on, and here's why (copied from their own website): "we've carefully listened to the songs of tens of thousands of different artists..." They've listened. A computer hasn't listened. They have listened. There is no substitute for subjective human analysis of music that is created 100% by humans.
But don't take my word for it. Give it a try.
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