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.

Screenshot mufin player 1.5

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.

mufin.drive in mufin player 1.5

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.

mufin.drive in My page 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.

Screenshot mufin player pro 1.5

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!

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.

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.