by Michelle Lentz
Back in October, I blogged about Mufin, a music matching engine designed for music enthusiasts and aficionados looking for new artists specifically related to preferred genres and sounds. Mufin uses an “audio fingerprinting” technology used called Audio ID in which you can type in the name of a song you like, or an artist, and find out what else out there is similar.
Now Mufin has released a new music player. Mufin Player could be used as a serious alternative to iTunes, with access to more music for purchase. Similar to the iTunes Genius Sidebar, you can select a song in your library and Mufin will find similar songs based on sound. You have the option, after listening, to purchase songs from Amazon and eMusic. There is also an integration with Ticketmaster.
A neat twist to the music player is the ability to sort your own music library based on sound. Select a track within your music library and the player can find other tracks by sound similarity and create a playlist. The player also integrates with your Mufin online account and pulls its source from the online Mufin engine.
In my testing, I seem to have hit or miss luck with the track similarity and music recommendation engines. Maybe I just listen to odd music. But I’ve read good reviews and if you’re itching to use something other than iTunes, the Mufin Music player might work quite well for you. It was able to access my iPod without a problem. One note: the software is currently PC only.
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Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net
{ 1 comment }
It’s great to see real alternatives to iTunes that offer many of the same services.
I wonder how Mufin’s recommendations would compare to Pandora’s, as the two take a comparable approach to recommendations based on indexing music by fingerprint/Genome – but I suppose this would vary by individual.
Movie recommendations are “behind” music in this sense – but at we recently launched the first semantic discovery engine for movies and TV shows, powered by the Movie Genome.
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