In our last post we gave you a sneak peak of mufin for iTunes on Mac…but why bother with screenshots if you can have the real deal? mufin for iTunes is now available for Mac, so get ready for some serious playlist action! iTunes users on the PC have already been enjoying mufin for iTunes since last November, and now Mac users can do the same: Create playlists that match your mood and uncover hidden gems by crossing genres, regions, and eras. Just pick a track and mufin for iTunes builds a playlist with songs from your iTunes library that go great with it. As always with mufin, only sound matters. This allows you to build playlists for any song in your library…even self-produced music or tracks that are missing title or artist name.

mufin for iTunes, Mac version

Another advantage of our sound-based approach: You can keep your privacy. Apple Genius requires you to submit details of the media stored in your iTunes library such as track names, play counts, ratings and other stuff we don’t even want to know about. With mufin for iTunes this isn’t necessary. While mufin for iTunes needs to analyze the sound of your iTunes library to work it doesn’t even need an Internet connection. No information about the sound of your iTunes library is sent to anyone – not to us, not to Apple.

Moreover, we have integrated the ability to rate recommendations on mufin.com This allows you to rate how good or bad recommendations from mufin.com are. Mufin learns which kind of recommendation is your preference and personalizes future music recommendations.

Rate music recommendations on mufin.com

Download mufin for iTunes and let us know how you like it. BTW we have updated the PC version as well with peformance improvements and bugfixes.

Over the week we have baked something special for you: an improved web-based mufin player. When we launched the “search full-track” feature we had to remove the functionality to pop out the music player built into mufin.com. Every time you switched to another web page, playback would stop.  The popout functionality is now back, but who would have thought that a tiny icon would make such a difference?

Icon to pop-out web-based player

Because now you can add a track to a playlist even if the player is popped out. This way you can browse and discover music on mufin.com and add your newly discovered tracks to a playlist while listining to your playlist of choice - all at the same time.  This means you have a music player with millions of tracks waiting to be discovered and played.

Web-based mufin player

Unfortunatly the improved web-player is only working with Firefox and Internet Explorer for now, it doesn’t work with Safari yet. We also added the much requested auto-login feature as well, now you can automatically log in at mufin.com without having to enter your username and password each time. This way, all your playlists on mufin.com are just one click away, thus allowing you to open or save playlists on the spot. Some more mufin.com playlist goodness will be coming to your speakers  soon - watch this space

And finally a.k.a. one more thing, here’s a sneak peak on mufin for iTunes Mac:

mufin for iTunes beta screenshot - Mac version

Today on mufin.com, we have merged what always belonged together: Discovering and listening to music at the same time. Since we launched mufin last year the most requested feature is the possibility to listen to a music track in its whole. While the sound samples give you a good first impression of a track, listening to the entire song, however, is the real deal for your ears.

And here is how it works: Like before you can prelisten a song by clicking on the big play button. If you like a track, you can search for the full length version on Youtube and SkreemR.

Just click on ‘Search full track’ to start the search. The search results will be displayed directly below the original track. If there is more than just one result, for example a ‘live version’, simply click on ‘Prev’ or ‘Next’ to browse the different versions.

You can use any track from the search results to build a playlist. If you like a mix, just save the playlist and listen to it over and over again later. So, set the playlist, ready, go!

PS: We have also released a new version of the iTunes add-ons were lots of bugs have been fixed. Download it here.

It’s been a little more than a week now since we launched the mufin player, and we have been getting a ton of feedback from you guys. We really appreciate all the input you have been sending us – keep it coming! We’re currently going through all the emails and tweets, but so far it seems many of you would love to have a mufin player for Mac and Linux. We haven’t decided on the platforms we’re going to support in the future yet, but right now we’re working on making our iTunes add-on available on the Mac. The mufin player beta itself works perfectly of course has quirks here and there, with some of you having issues with logging in at mufin.com. We’re checking the cause of this problem, as with all the other bugs you sent in.

Regarding proxy settings: The integrated browser uses the same proxy settings  as your Internet Explorer.  However, loggin into mufin.com or getting music recommendations from mufin.com behind a proxy is not possible (yet).  However, no Internet connection is required for using soundsort a.k.a organize by sound a.k.a recommendations from your local music collection. We’re now working on incorporting your feedback as well as adding some more exciting features into the player to keep your music discovery going. Stay tuned to the blog or Twitter.com/mufin to keep up to date!

Finally, here are some quotes on the beta release:

“The recommendations were spot-on“
Matt Rosoff – CNET

“Mufin’s recommendation features are extremely interesting“
Frederic Lardinois – ReadWriteWeb

“A standalone player like this is a smart step for Mufin to take“
David Chartier, Ars Technica

“despite constantly crashing and taking up a huge amount of memory (when they say “beta” they mean it”), mufin is actually fantastic“
nd_snsch, via Twitter

“FUCK YEAH! Someone give the guy that made this an award! www.mufin.com“
dara_dalton, via Twitter

Fasten your seatbelts, the mufin player is here! ‘So what’, you say? Well the mufin player is the  best first media player that lets you sort your music library by sound. Sounds good, eh? With mufin.com, we wanted to give you an alternative way to discover new music, and with the mufin player, we’re giving you a completely new way to manage and organize your music library – ’sorting by sound’ is what it’s all about.

mufin player with soundsort and online music recommendation enabled

The mufin player doesn’t just sort your music by artists or track names like you are used to, but also by sound similarity. It’s not just useful when you’re building a playlist, but also to keep track of which music tracks go together in your library musically. Since its all based on sound, all tracks in your collection will be included in the sorting, no matter if they have proper META information like album or artist name or not.

Overall, the mufin player has a lot of great stuff packed into it:

• mufin soundsort: As mentioned before, ’soundsort’ allows you to sort your music library by sound.
• Integration with mufin.com: You can get and listen to music recommendations from mufin.com for any track in your library. In addition, when you log into mufin.com using the mufin player, you can see which tracks have been recently played and also which tracks have been played the most on your discovery dashboard.
• Completion of META data: If you have any tracks in your library that are missing information like artists or album name, mufin ‘audioid’ lets you fix it in a flash.
• Playlist generation: The mufin player features the same playlist generation as mufin for iTunes. It works better than other playlist generation stuff out there, or at least that’s what these guys say!
• Burn/import CDs, fast ‘as-you-type’ search and lots of other stuff: If you’re into details, you can find them here.

Just in case you were wondering, the mufin player is basically the next version of the mufin MusicFinder we released a while ago. However, these programs only share ‘mufin’ in their product name; it’s a completely different beast on the outside and on the inside.

Grab your free copy of the mufin player beta here (Windows 2k/XP/Vista, 32 MB)

It’s always a surprise when you take look at your last tweet or blog entry, only to discover that it’s been ages since you posted something the last time. So, allowing you to take a peek at what we’ve been doing over the past months is long overdue. First of all, there was a site update this week (yay!) with many small improvements to be found. 

I won’t bother you with boring technical details for example the frontend of the player is now soley build in JS, but one thing that has improved greatly are loading times of the entire. Of course, we would like to know whether you also noticed a change (comments, anyone?), or if our speedometer just plays tricks on us. 

At the same time the site update is clearing the path for two new additions we will be releasing this and next month: fmiun pyaelr and tmea rchesa – that’s all i’m giving away for now!

We were also busy on the trade show side of things and had booth at the MIDEM music trade show in January. It was really exciting to see how the so-called fragmentation of audiences as a result of digitization has spread to the trade show. Instead of few major labels as in the past years, this year the exhibitors were mainly small enterprises offering products and services dealing with all aspects of (marketing) music in the digital age. 

Speaking of trade shows: We’re excited to be part of the Berlin Music Commission’s booth at this year’s South by South West in Austin. We share the booth with the nice guys from Budde Fall and Morr Music among others. And did I mention the free beer and Currywurst at the Berlin Fest at Bush Square on March 20th already? There’s gonna be some dope Berlin tunes there as well!

Currywurst (Photo by Geir Halvorsen)

Our personal digital music collections have grown enormously in the last few years. Having thousands of songs on a PC is not at all uncommon now, but actually an everyday experience. But the larger a music collection is, the more difficult it becomes to navigate throughout the collection. Most music players only display the titles saved in lists, and the organisational principles applied are text-based and only allow alphabetical sorting. The music itself or the sound of the individual songs usually isn’t a factor. A large portion of songs contained is therefore never or only seldom listened to.

For this reason, alternative approaches for visualizing music collections and for sorting music is becoming more and more interesting. An exciting example of this is the MusicBox project by Anita Lillie, which developed in connection with her master’s work at MIT and is currently receiving a lot of attention.

The mufin team has also been busy for a long time with the topic of visualizing music collections. In 2007, MAGIX MP3 Maker 14 was one of the first commercial products featuring this technology and had already received plenty of positive feedback.

In November, version 15 of MP3 Maker (German) was published. Besides additional exciting functions like sound-based playlist generation and online music recommendations, a further developed version of visualization (mufin vision) was built in.

mufin vision’s functionality has been clearly expanded. Now you can arrange your music collection in two or three-dimensional space. Individual songs are displayed as points or circles, whereby titles with similar properties lie closer together. As a genuine alternative to the normal list view, mufin vision can apply many functions exactly like in the list: e.g. all titles can be played back by double clicking, right clicking opens the context menu, etc.

The highlight of the new mufin vision is the arrangement of properties. The X, Y, and Z axes, the size of circles for titles, and also the color of the individual songs can be interrelated to arbitrary information (the graphical similarity to Anita’s work really surprised us as a perfect coincidence). Besides sound characteristics like tempo, percussiveness, or audio density, metadata (e.g. publication year) and information about the music collection (e.g. most recently added) can also be assigned. With mufin vision, your music collection can be navigated freely, understood at a glance, and browsed viewed like a map.

MP3 Maker is available now at MAGIX in German, and international versions will be appearing in 2009.

We’ve opened up the mufin Beta website, so now everyone can discover music with their own favorite tunes. Some time has passed since the closed beta was launched, but even if things have been quiet here on our blog we’ve been working hard behind the scenes. We’ve been evaluating user feedback, checking and improving the usability of the page, processing numerous test reports, working on various details and adding many new functions.

Besides many new discovery functions and detailed improvements mufin for Facebook and mufin for iTunes (beta) are now also available. With mufin for Facebook you can add music discovery functions directly to your Facebook profile, just like with mufin for MySpace.

mufin for iTunes shows you how to use the technology of the music discovery engine on your PC to rediscover your music collection. After installation of the program your iTunes music collection is analyzed without requiring an Internet connection or iTunes Shop account. As soon as your music tracks have been analyzed (this may take 1-3 seconds per track) you can create playlists with similar sounding tracks based on one or several songs. Only the sound is relevant for compilation of the playlist. By activating the “Relevance” feature you can also set the threshold of the similarity of the tracks to be included in the various playlists.

Phew, what a start! First of all, thanks to you all of you for taking the time to show your interest in mufin – that’s really awesome. We got some great reviews from all over the Web, like here, here, and here..or here. According to the comments and reviews, most people asked for full track playback, and some responded that the recommendendations didn’t always seem to make sense. We want to offer the full track too, but it simply wasn’t possible to implement this in the time we had available to us, since getting the recommendations right was our first priority. But as you can see, we designed the interface with full track capability in mind, you can create playlists using “More options” and also pop-out the player (that little rectangle in the upper right corner of the player).

You may get some ‘freakomendations‘ like here, but always look out for the musical similarties of the recommended track and not the genre, similar title name, or artist image like ‘nineinchnailsvsbritneyspears’ *cough*. We’re constantly trying to improve the recommendation algorithm and have some great features in the works that will allow you to tailor the recommendations to your individual tastes in music.

On the downside, we had some typical private beta technical problems with album covers and prelistening tracks not loading, but they are fixed now.

Times are changing, because from now on, mufin, your music discovery engine, is live! Tell mufin about your favorite songs and it will respond with songs that sound similar –  mufin only needs to analyze a song’s sound to help you discover new music – popularity, origin, or genre aren’t important. We’ve designed the user interface so that it’s easy to see similarities between the songs, giving you the opportunity to browse our music catalog based on the sound alone. My latest discovery is “Kopfüberkreuz” by Monochrome, a small German band, and I originally started the sound discovery process with Faith No More’s “Star A.D“.

Our new site is still in private beta; we’re still polishing up the site design and usability to make sure that we’ve ironed out any remaining bugs. And of course, we can already incorporate your feedback about what we can improve or what should stay the way it is. Don’t worry if you haven’t gotten an invite code yet – just leave your email here, and we’ll let you know as soon as we have some more seats available onboard. Have fun discovering new music!