Whether plotting thoughts using mind mapping, or explaining election results using graphics - to deal with a variety of information individuals need visualization techniques in order to be able to find the right information more effectively.

Visualization for party donations in Germany 2002 - 2011 [1]

Also in the digital music arena a real hype has surrounded visualizations recently. People's collections are becoming increasingly larger and online music services offer access to huge catalogues of up to 18 million songs. On top of this there is recommendation technology and new devices with touch screen technology, that raise our understanding of relationships to a new level. Scrolling in list views has become bog standard.

What follows, therefore, is a short but systematic presentation of the visualization possibilities for use in software music players. Visualization in general, refers to the representation of a music collection in a player and more specifically to the interactive variants as part of the graphical user interface.

Interactive music collection visualization in the free mufin player 2.0

In the context of listening to music the actual data used for visualizations plays a crucial role. In general, discographic data, the sound itself, the evaluation of listening habits and information about the cultural context are all available:

• The basis for finding your way around music collections is almost always using data about the music (e.g. Title, Album, Artist, Genre)
• Nowadays sound analysis can also be used for organizational purposes in music collections (e.g. Mood, Tempo, Instruments)
• Listening habits refers to the individual preferences and/or information about the musical tastes of lots of users (e.g. evaluation of their own listening history, LastFM and collaborative filtering)
• And cultural context can be mapped, for example, with historical, geographical and biographical data, as well as with social tags that users create themselves

Usually, a combination of very different information is used to facilitate listening to music and navigation through a collection (e.g, sound and information about the music).

Soundbite. Plugin for Songbird, the result of work on Masters based on: [3]

A further question about music visualization concerns the level at which visualizations are found: should individual songs, albums, artists or genres be displayed and is it possible to jump between these levels (e.g. by zooming and level of detail)? It makes more and more sense for a music player and for individual music collections to be at track level within a display, in order to have control over the individual songs. Here, the context of listening to albums, playlists or songs by certain artists, must also be considered.

Discovr. Visualization at artist level to discover new music. [11]

Musicbox. Prototype of the labors of a Master thesis at MIT. [5]

The possibilities are almost unlimited in terms of visualizations and actually computing them. Using the above named data interactive charts and maps of all kinds can be created. What also needs to be decided is whether the graphical summaries are dynamic (e.g. for changes within a collection) or whether certain elements (e.g. songs or artists) with a fixed position should be displayed in the visualization: in terms of navigation.

A standard is already emerging among individual music collections: visualizations go all the way back to song level, the songs are arranged on an interactive map (2D and 3D), and cover, colors, spacing between elements, as well as the size of graphic elements for displaying information are used. The results of the sound file analysis are combined with information about the music and listening habits. Finding your way around a music collection today is therefore navigating using the music itself.

It looks as though this is one of the many responses to the current technological developments and ways of dealing with digital music - where the journey on the music map is headed still remains to be seen.

mufin player for Android (Version 1.5: Release in June 2011)

mufin vision
With mufin's own technology for automated music analysis, we have also focused on the visualization of music. The first commercial product to provide the technology to create visualizations of digital music collections was released worldwide in 2007, it was music player software for PC, MAGIX MP3 Maker 14. You can currently test out the visualization technology mufin vision in the mufin player for PC or Android for free. In June 2011 the new version of the Android app will appear.

Sources:
[1] http://labs.vis4.net/parteispenden/
[2] http://www.musicthinktank.com/mtt-open/face-the-interface.html
[3] http://www.repeatingbeats.com/resources/Slloyd_MSc_External.pdf
[4] http://ismir2007.ismir.net/proceedings/ISMIR2007_p173_lamere.pdf
[5] http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/documents/Anita_FINAL_THESIS.pdf
[6] http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
[7] http://visualizingmusic.com/
[8] http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5853
[9] http://www.formater.de/
[10] http://www.datavis.ca/papers/hbook.pdf
[11] http://itunes.apple.com/app/discovr/id412768094?mt=8

As promised we don’t want to be a long time coming and proudly present you the new mufin player 2.0 that is so much more than a music software.

So, what’s new?

The mufin vision is now integrated in the free mufin player 2.0, too. Thus, your music collections becomes a real sound experience as all tracks are mapped as circles how they sound. That’s not all, though. The mufin vision shows you playlists – automatically or manually created – and albums as star constellations right in the music universe. Sounds cooool, don’t you think?

mufin player 2.0 w/ mufin vision

You know the mufin.drive from mufin player 1.5 already. We have optimised and further integrated it into mufin player, so you can effortlessly save your tracks online and have them at hand anywhere. Besides, the mufin.drive is not only accessible through the player or from mufin.com anymore but also from anywhere, from on the go and generally. Because….

... when you go to www.mufinplayer.com, you will find the mufin player directly in your browser as a web app. Access to mufin.drive, playlist creation, mufin vision and everything else included. Simply the mufin player for the web; good for when at friends, at a party, at uni, at work and everywhere your heart is longing for your favourite tunes. So, once you have stored your songs on mufin.drive, you can listen to them with mufinplayer.com, without any further installation of mufin player.

mufinplayer.com w/ mufin vision

We didn’t stop there but we also pulled something for on the go out of the hat: mufin player for Android! With the native app, you can either live to see your music stored on the mufin.drive visually sorted by sound with mufin vision, or your music collection which you directly transferred from mufin player to your phone. Mufin to go, sort of. It goes without saying that automatic playlists with songs that go great together, visual navigation and simply have fun listening to music are top priority with this app, too. 

mufin player for Android app

You can see, it is a comprehensive all-round package. Everything’s there and everything’s just for you. You can download mufin player 2.0 here for free. Have fun with it and we’re looking forward to your feedback!

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.