Music enthusiasts will have another way to search for their favorite tunes in coming months. Mufin, a Berlin, Germany-based company, has launched the beta version of its music-discovery platform, mufin.com. It scans each track for its density, tempo, and rhythm, then draws comparisons with other songs that match. What you get is a system that lets you find similar tracks by sound, even if they cross multiple genres. Mufin, which is short for music finder, is based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, the same Germany-based research organization that developed the MP3 player’s compression algorithm.

How it works:
Similar to other music discovery services, Mufin starts by asking you to input the name of a favorite track or artist. After getting a list of songs that match your query, you can click on “similar tracks” for each title, which is where Mufin’s secret sauce kicks in. For each song’s similar tracks, you can see the percentage match, based on the characteristics that the service looks at, which include tempo, rhythm structure, and which instruments are used.
In addition to its search tool, Mufin provides a playlist creator for tracks that have streaming rights. You can’t share these playlists with anyone else (yet), but you can save them for later, as well as pop them out in their own window to play while you’re off doing other things. If you’re more keen to own the tracks the service is integrated with iTunes, and soon Amazon’s MP3 store, so you can buy what you like

Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 10:09 am | by Kur-nia-one |