Tags
Related Posts
Share This
MUFIN: Music Discovery for Those Without Ears
Mufin touts itself as
“your music discovery engine, using which you can easily discover new music in our database with millions of songs – with exactly the sound that you dig.”
I’m not sure that’s even really a sentence they’ve got up there…but moving on. Mufin also claims that it
“knows the musical essence of millions of songs and connects those songs that have a similar essence. This essence consists of sound properties like tempo, instruments, sound density or harmony.”
Unfortunately for me, Mufin didn’t pan out.
After taking a 10 search stroll through the Mufin engine, I found the website rather easy to use. Layout was clean and navigation was intuitive. The practice of being able to quickly dig into the music discovery process vs. a radio-and-wait interface like Pandora allowed me to move throughout the site and hit more artists without having to listen directly to each and every song.
But here’s where the icing goes sour. Mufin’s music catalog although containing more than 10 times the advertised size of Pandora’s catalog, is still 2 million songs short from sell-out app Napster.
When performing a search for some of my favorite, lesser known bands, a few songs popped up (such as a search for Pinback), but when I selected a great track, “Lyon,” I was returned some really lame, inaccurate representations of related music.
Okay, so let’s try Britney Spears. After searching for her and coming up with 460 results (no one should have that much Britney Spears) I clicked on the first option…”Overtake…” It returned me with no related music.
I really want to like this product, but so far the suggestions have been dissappointing and the catalog is still fairly limited, with many tracks not open for users to listen to them.
Try the site out for yourself and post a comment on what you think. Do you prefer Pandora, Last.fm, or Mufin for music discovery?
