First things first, though: From today, you can download for free the new mufin player 1.5 from mufin.com. With this release, the design and the interface have been revised, many details improved and the mufin.drive is seeing the light of day.

The mufin.drive is an online storage which makes saving and listening to your music on the internet more than easy. After logging in from your mufin player 1.5, you can upload MP3s to mufin.drive with a single click. Mufin.drive offers free of charge storage space for 200 songs and 1 GB of music, respectively.

You can search for tracks as in the mufin player, sort and use the songs for compiling playlists once you have uploaded music to your online storage on mufin.com.

Additionally, the mufin player pro has been completely renewed. Especially the 3D sound universe comes up with additional improvements. Automatic Playlists are now shown as constellations in the universe. Manually built playlists can be viewed in Vision-display, too. If you have got a multitouch device, you can even use your hands for navigating the universe which we will explain more detailed in a later blogpost. With the mufin player pro, you will get even more space on mufin.drive: you can save online 600 songs and 3 GB, respectively. Furthermore, you can re-download your songs from the web which makes it an easy backup solution for your most important tracks. The best of it: The upgrade from mufin player pro to mufin player pro 1.5 is free of charge for all pro-users.

Finally, there is the new mufin.com to mention which shows up with a totally revamped user interface as well as a new music player. You can embedd the very new player into your blog or website. When you share a playlist on Facebook, your friends can listen to it right there with our new player.

 

You can do everything at once now! After recently moving our Web Player on mufin.com to the lower edge of the screen, we have now re-arranged the entire site making it possible to listen to music without interruption while searching for new tracks on mufin.com. Additionally, sharing titles and playlist recommendations via Facebook and Twitter has been simplified even further. So, don't lose any time and share those playlists with your friends! By the way: the discovery centre regularly offers new playlist recommendations for logged-in users, such as: http://www.mufin.com/us/playlist/5712

And the best is yet to come: we have launched a new form of music visualization on mufin.com under "Vision".

By clicking on "Vision" similar titles are not presented in a list, but in a kind of map, which arranges music similar to a selected track  based on sound characteristics. Just as in the list view, you have acces to player, playists, history and auto playlist etc.

Using Vision is similiar to using online maps. You can move the view of the map, use the mouse wheel to zoom and navigate in the overview window at the bottom left to quickly reach an area further away. The more you zoom in, the more details per song you will be able see. Discovering music has never looked this good!

It’s time for a new version of the web-based mufin player. We just added a whole new range of functions for listening to, discovering, and sharing music online. Probably the neatest new feature is Auto-Playlist. If you are on an artist’s page with a discography, a click on Auto-Playlist will automatically create a playlist with music videos from that artist. Auto-Playlists are not limited to artist pages alone, you can use them on any detail page (e.g. tracks, albums).

In addition, you can now bring your playlist to the public. Let your friends join the fun and have them listen to playlists created on mufin.com. Just click “Public“ when saving your playlist. Simply click "Link" afterwards to open the public playlist ready to be viewed, explored and listened to. You can further send playlists to your friends by clicking "Share". As know from our mufin player, similar sounding tracks to whatever is being played at the moment are shown directly below the playlist.

You can explore other mufin user's playlists in a new playlist widget directly on your discovery dashboard.  And if you can't wait for the weekend to begin, our Berliner Elektroniker playlist should get you started right now.

 

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

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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.