by Michelle Lentz

When Brian first asked me to write about Mufin, I was a bit surprised by the name. Who would name a music service after a baked good? Mufin, however, is a shortened version of Music Finder. See, it all makes sense now.

At its heart, Mufin is not an internet radio station like Pandora, but is designed for music enthusiasts and aficionados looking for new artists specifically related to preferred genres and sounds. It’s music matching. In theory, you can type in the name of a song you like, or an artist, and find out what else out there is similar. This is an “audio fingerprinting” technology used by Mufin called Audio ID.

TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb all had good experiences with Mufin. Me? Not so much. Whenever I test these sorts of services, I use some specific songs. I started with Weezer’s Undone (The Sweater Song). While Mufin had no trouble finding the song, it was unable to match similar music. I was surprised. At the very least I expected it to offer me more Weezer.

Next I tried In the Mood, which is a classic by Glenn Miller. No such luck. It found a bunch of other songs that had the word “mood” in them. So I searched by Glenn Miller, which got me albums of his songs by other people and one by him. I clicked on Glenn Miller in that link and all sorts of songs by him appeared. Yeah, it was sort of a long way to go. And what do you know? In the Mood was listed as one of the songs and the service found similar pieces.

Now, I happen to know they’re similar because I’m familiar with the songs. I was unable to get Mufin to play any of the songs, whether in the listings or in my Mufin playlist. I don’t know if this has to do with my Mac, my Firefox (and various extensions), or what.

Because Mufin matches strictly on what the music sounds like, you get interesting results. What surprised me was that often the original artists were not the first artist listed. For instance, the first artist listed for Fool on the Hill was not The Beatles, but The Hill/Wiltschinsky Guitar Duo. The Beatles are in there though and the results for Fool on the Hill returned things such as You are the Sunshine of My Life. Over at VentureBeat, they make a good point that without the social aspect, you’re unable to filter out the good from the bad and are instead given a list of just similar-sounding songs.

I do like that Mufin gives you the links to buy the music. It directs you to Amazon or iTunes. I’m unsure how much of the music you get to hear, as I don’t believe it’s the entire track.

Mufin is in beta, so I’m sure the issues I was having will improve. If you’re looking for a recommendation engine, the Mufin database has over 3.5 million songs. It’s hard to go wrong.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology. You can also catch Michelle presenting on Twitter at the upcoming DevLearn ‘08 in San Jose.

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