The Music Hackday continues its endless journey in the search of the best music hacks around. After taking London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston and Stockholm by storm, San Francisco is the next city to get its fair share of music hacking and next generation music applications on May 15/16. If you haven’t heard of the hackday yet, it’s a full weekend of hacking where total music geeks like us people get together and create something beautiful out of music, hardware, art and the web.

So, how do projects which saw the light of day at a Music Hackday look and sound like? Check out our personal favourite citysounds.fm, which lets you listen to the latest tunes from your city. Or dive right in and watch this vid from the Hackday in Amsterdam in April this year:

Last week, we launched mufin for artists giving anyone the chance to add their self-produced music to the music discovery engine on mufin. Your music will be recommended to anyone on mufin who is looking for that type of sound. This also means that you can have your tunes promoted next to popular artists if you share a similar sound.

Now if you’re using SoundCloud already, it's even easier to add your music to mufin. Simply select ‘Connect to SoundCloud’ when starting to upload your music and we will copy all the public music from your SoundCloud profile to mufin. This way, you don’t have to upload your music all over again and can spent more time on producing great tunes. As soon as your music has been added to the music discovery engine, it can be discovered by others who dig a sound like yours. Now add your music and get discovered!

We just launched our newest addition to the music discovery engine: mufin for artists. It allows you to add your own music to mufin for free, making it possible for our users to easily discover your music. For example, a user searches for on mufin. If a track of yours is similar to that music, it will be recommended to it. It doesn’t matter how known or unknown your music is, as for mufin only the sound of the music matters. In addition, users can put your music on playlists or post it on Facebook or Twitter with the ability to directly listen to it. This way, friends too can find out about your music, fueling promotion and viral buzz.

Of course, you can decide yourself if you want to allow streaming of your tracks or not. You can also include a link to your homepage if someone wants to find out more about you. Mufin for artists is free, so check it out and let us know in the comments what music mufin thinks your tracks are similar to.

 

Our friends over at SoundCloud are organizing the first German Music Hack Day taking place in Berlin next week, September 18th till 20th to be precise.

What is the Music Hack Day? Music Hack Day is an un-conference style event where hackers & coders and companies providing an open API work together on new web/software/music projects in just a short weekend. The first Music Hack Day took place in the London offices of the Guardian where more than 30 new projects saw the light of the day, Citysounds.fm is just one of the very cool applications created on the first event.

We're excited, to say the least, that Music Hack Day is coming to our home town Berlin. And while you're in Berlin, make sure to check out some of the other cool events happening next week such as the Berlin Music Days or the #camp.

There have been some technical problems on mufin.com since last Friday, which made it sometimes difficult to login (directly on the website or through the mufin player). All problems have been sorted out, and mufin.com is fully up and running again. Logging in from mufin player now also works again. Unfortunately, the outage has broken the login and playlist data of some of you. If you still can't login, please do the following: 1. Go to mufin.com and login using your existing email and password. 2. After login, a new page "Complete registration" instead of the usal "My page" will be shown:

3. Please fill-in your username and birthdate and accept the terms of use. Click then on "Finalize". 4. That's it! You should now be able to login again, either from mufin player or directly from the website. If you're still experiencing problems, please write us at team [at] mufin.com. Again, sorry if the outage has caused you any inconveniences.

 

We're very sorry but unfortunatly we're currently experiencing some technical difficulties. You might have problems logging in or accessing your playlists on mufin.com, please stay tuned for more details.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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:

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.

 

 

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 f or 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!  

 

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!