Filed under: Audio, Internet, Features, Web services, web 2.0
Mufin launches new music discovery engine beta, Download Squad readers are invited
As a music lover, one of my favorite innovations of the last five years or so has come in the form of music discovery services. Services like Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody and iTunes 8 have made it easy to find artists or songs that are similar to your musical tastes and preferences. The only problem with these services, is that they are based on limited databases (like the iTunes Music Store, for iTunes's Genius Mode), reviews or ratings by other users and overall popularity. That means that the music discovered might indeed be similar, but it really limits results to mainsream songs and generic genre distinctions. This is great for an automatic playlist, but not so great for really finding new bands or artists.
This is why Mufin's new music discovery engine is so unique; it analyzes the actual structure of the song, not just the genre meta-data. Mufin's discovery engine just entered private beta, but Download Squad readers can get in on the action by using this invite link: http://beta.mufin.com/start?ic=e75eecf85a4a547ca9379d6f8b6c23bb.
Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), Mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in Mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.
On our second episode of the 
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