Across the universe – Dive into your 3D sound universe with mufin player pro (and win a free copy along the way)
Almost a half million people have discovered the sound of their music using the mufin player over the last six months. We thank you very much! In the meanwhile, we have been listening to your feedback, tweaking mufin.com and our iTunes plugin. And of course we’ve been working on the final version of the mufin player that we’re releasing today. What’s new? How about some Last.fm scrobbling, Twitter and Facebook integration, album artwork, and lots of bug fixing? There’s even more, go here for all the shiny details. But before you jump the ship and grab your free copy read on.
Today, we’re also releasing the mufin player pro. The mufin player pro features all the great tools found in the mufin player PLUS the 3D sound universe (not to mention things like the sound-based duplicate song finder). Interacting and playing with music in visual way has been spinning in our heads (and others) for awhile. The mufin player pro is the result of our year-long research on this topic. The 3D sound universe found in the mufin player pro lets you explore and manage your music collection in a visual way. Check out the video to get a first idea what that means:
mufin player pro 3D sound universe
Today’s music players are basically spreadsheets that play music. Ok, that’s a bit exaggerated but still – using music visualizations to access and manage your music collection, like Apple’s CoverFlow, are fairly new. Mufin player pro arranges all tracks in a 3D space, based on whatever sound metrics you choose. All your happy, fast-paced songs? In the upper right if you choose “tempo” and “mood” as metric. Calm songs with an acoustic feel? Tick “Aggressiveness” and “Sound” and you’ll have them right in front of you. In addition, you can navigate freely (and playfully) in your 3D sound universe as if it was Space Invaders redux. The possibilties are endless, far too many to cover them all in this post. That’s why we’ll go into more detail in future blog posts.
As with all good things, mufin player pro comes with a price. Unlike the free mufin player, its $29.99. We think this a reasonable price, since some of the included tools like duplicate song finder or cleaning up song meta data are sold elsewhere as stand-alone tools for the same price. And in the end, you might not have to pay at all: Everyone who comments will take part in a drawing for 10 mufin player pro licenses!
On a side note, we also incorporated a new visualization tool into mufin.com, just click “vision” and see what happens. More on that later.
I’d never heard of Mufin until today, but I am really loving the player!
Nice to see ongoing efforts in the development of your player. Your 3D experience is still awesome (as introducted with the MP3 Maker 15). On the other side also a nice cover representation for simple browsing through one’s personal music collection is essential. It will be interesting how effectively your auto-correction tool will work. Nevertheless, the connection to social network, especially to Last.FM, will push your application forward.
Hope to see more interesting developments like customizable playlist generation etc.
Cheers zazi
Oh, the registration for the last.fm integration is a bit hidden from the perspective of the mufin player. Why don’t integrate a direct sign-in function for last.fm into the player.
Cheers zazi
Just some more improvements and bug reports so far:
1. custumizable in playlists (why don’t support this for playlists?)
2. reverse integration of last.fm stats (especially playcount; Songbird has such a support)
4. what about background information of the artists, songs, albums etc.?
5. is the recommendation similarity mesurement also based on collaborative and contextual filtering?
6. what about selectable and customizable (changing the weights etc.) similarity mesurements?
7. bug: if I play something and go to the option menu, the music stops suddenly.
Cheers,
zazi
I found lots of improvements compared to the previous beta, I really like it more.
However still some tracks are not collected into the database with complete information (allthough I believe the ID3 tags are complete). I notice missing track numbers, sometimes the album name is shortened and no Genre is shown.
I cannot seem to find why this is happening.
Comments:
When creating a playlist by simularity or automatic playlist it would be nice to have a checkbox option where you can select to leave out identical tracks (now in the generated playlist some identical tracks are being selected)
Regards, Gerard
Mufin seems like a good idea so far but I am having trouble reading the small text in my library. Need to have options for Font sizes. Thanks
Hey there,
Cool post, I just found it and I’m already a fan.
Wow, this is awesome!
I have been using this player for some weeks and am beginning to love it ! It’s just after my mind. It has everything I want in a media player. Thank you for such a wonderful player.