In April, we presented you our fresh mufin player 1.5. Now, we take it to the next level and bring the mufin player in 20 languages:

English, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Taiwanese, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Portugese and Hungarian.

Which means for you: All the mufin player features come to you in your favourite language or mother tongue: Sorting your music collection by sound, automatic playlists, the mufin.drive, music discoveries from mufin.com, scrobbling and sharing. You can download the mufin player in your language of choice directly from mufin.com. The mufin.drive on mufin.com is as usual supported in English and German for your convenience. 

Same applies to the mufin player pro. You can purchase the player in all 20 languages directly from our shop. 

Moreover, we have news for mufin.com on board. Our web player has been further optimised, especially for screens with low resolution, and our search function has been improved, too. You can also sedulously tag artists and albums across the page from now on.

Interesting in particular: You can newly tag and comment public playlists, which is extremely cool for sharing music. Just let your friends know what you think of their music playlists or your own and share it on Facebook, Twitter or via email. Besides, our music discovery engine now recommends you similar playlists for endless music pleasure. 

So, have a good time with everything and we are looking forward to your feedback!

The integrated mufin technology supports the music tinkerer to find the right sound in the right moment. With the help of mufin, the Digital DJ recommends a list with similiar songs to any imported song allowing constant mixing. The recommendations are solely soundbased meaning that the own new songs as well as the long hidden musical treasures can be found easily without needing to rifle through the whole music collection manually. The actual selection is of course left to the arty.

Additionally, the programme features further more than neccessary mixing tools including Fading, Looping and Sampling, just to name a few. The user can either load and save different playlist and mulitple DJ-sets, let's say maybe for different occasions, or can directly access the iTunes playlists. Besides, the Digital DJ knows your music's beat and can for example set a mastertempo that the whole mix of the night is geared to. And, as it is not what you say but rather how you say it, the Digital DJ provides you with tools to lock the key and let the programme automix.

As we find, an exciting product not only for pro-DJs but also practical for beginners and enthusiasts. See mufin at its best: mix through your music collection without missing the right beat.

The Digital DJ runs on Windows and Mac.

Have you tried it out yourself? What is your experience? Let us know in the comments.

Music Hackday is coming to San Francisco

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:

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.

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!

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.

And of course, 2009 brought some changes to mufin: The 3D sound universe saw the light of day, and so did the mufin player. We added a video search, auto-playlists, a new visual navigation to mufin.com amongst a bunch of other things.

How have you been using mufin during the last year, though? What tracks got discovered the most, which albums did you like and what artists were hot on mufin?

Read on to find out and remember that mufin is a sound-based music discovery engine. You’ll not only find the usual suspects in our best of list but also some new and surprising music.

Most discovered tracks 2009

1. Spiritual Awakening – Rage
2. The Love - Intrallazzi & Fratty
3. Stairway to Heaven (British Rock Symphony) - Ann Wilson
4. Around and around - The Rolling Stones
5. April Love - Pat Boone

Expectedly, the artists you have been looking for covered the whole musical field from Singer/Songwriter via Pop to Alternative/ Rock. Take a look yourself at the ones that have been searched for the most:

Most search artists

1. Sting
2. Muse
3. Reamonn
4. Neil Young
5. Beck
6. A Perfect Circle
7. Pet Shop Boys

As with artists, the most searched albums are quite interesting, too:

Most searched albums

1. Geheimnisse der Stille - G. Pommerien
2. Ancient Spirit – Patrice
3. Knights Of Cydonia – Muse

What is your album of the year, did you find more exiting recommendations on mufin.com yourself? Then let us know in the comments.

Is it possible to own enough music? We would rather say, no, not in the slightest, which you agree to when taking a look at your revealing answers concerning your music collection. But take a look yourself: more than one quarter of you folks state to own at least 100GB or more of music.

Besides, we were interested in how you predominantly listen to music:

Concerning our question whether you own a portable music device, you came up with an ambitious and clear-cut YES, I do own one (83,44%). Also, two thirds of the owners use their portables daily or regularly several times a week. More than 20% of you do use social networks about daily, further 20% of you at least  several times a week. Opposed to that, music websites are somewhat behind, 9% of the survey participants stated to use it on a daily basis, 23% make use of it a couple of times per week.

What kind of listening habits have you got? How much music do you normally listen to? The answers are pretty straight forward: pretty much and pretty frequent. The picturesque illustration below shows you, what listening type you consider yourself as.

We are looking forward to your feedback and many thanks again for your support!

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!

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.

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.

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.

Auto-playlist on mufin.com

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.

Public playlist on mufin.com

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.

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.

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

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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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)

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)

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.

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.

• User interfaces, visualization, music organization
• Music analysis (harmony, melody, timbre, rhythm, etc.) and transcription
• Programming languages for music analysis and synthesis
• Music recommendation and recognition
• Social networks, metadata, tags and blogs