Mufin used to be a service that has a powerful music recommendation engine which allows you to generate playlists which contain similar music. The service pulls music from your library and then does a little abra-cadabra and out comes a playlist similar to any song you have in your library.
Now they have upgraded their service by launching a native music player called, unsurprisingly, the Mufin Music Player that comes automatically integrated with this awesome feature. The service has been compared to Apple’s Genius music-matching technology but with a few key differences.
The Apple Genius is a service introduced in iTunes 8, which scans your library and matches music according to an aggregate data of other people’s listening habits. So, say there are a lot of people who put Britney Spears music together with Carrie Underwood; if you were to ask Genius to suggest some music to go with your Britney Spears collection, Carrie Underwood will come up first.
The Mufin service works a little bit differently. Instead of relying on subjective listening data based on user preferences, they quantify music into 40 discrete parameters or audio characteristics (such as pitch, genre, vocals, etc). From that information, they are able to put together music with similar audio characteristics. It is a different, objective approach that somehow manages to create some pretty interesting results.
The new player has an interface similar to iTunes, and comes with the ability to sort by sound, in addition to sorting by artist and album. If you want to continue using iTunes as your music player, you can download a Mufin plugin for iTunes, but you are limited to only creating playlists using the plugin and lacks other features native to the Mufin Music Player. But for my purposes, it is more than enough.
Give Mufin a try and let me know what you think!