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.
