Does Mufin Know Music? - Hilarity Ensues
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The Beach Boys, I'm sure you'll agree, isn't much of a test. Unfortunately, mufin didn't have any of my favorite filkers in its database...but it did have Christine Lavin. This led to some unintentionally funny matches. When I tried to match Lavin's “Ain't Love Grand?” song, one of the top three selections was from Jessica Simpson. And yes, listening to the snippet, I could see how mufin thought those were similar. But I'm not sure any human would have made that match!
It got even funnier when I tried to match one of my favorite Lavin songs, “What Was I Thinking?” If you know that song, you know it's about a woman who makes hasty decisions and then regrets them. So what can you make of it when one of the top three songs returned as a match was “Put On a Happy Face”? Ummm. Did someone program mufin with a sense of the ironic?
And yet, even there, I have to give mufin credit, because that is also a song I like. In fact, I liked many of the other matches on the first page of results for “What Was I Thinking?” With one exception, they were all female vocalists, most of whom I knew at least by reputation. I was mildly disappointed by one song, by Edith Piaf. It sounded similar, but it was in German. Perhaps it is merely my American provincialism showing, but I wish the site had a way for you to specify that you want to hear only songs in English. The vast majority were in that language, though, so I really don't have a cause to complain (and the German clip was enjoyable, if incomprehensible to me).
I have another nit to pick. It's a little embarrassing to admit to a spelling error when you also edit, but I put in the name of a famous classical composer wrong. When mufin couldn't find an exact match, it offered similar matches to me. Since I was only off by one letter, I thought it would turn up the composer. Instead, it turned up a different musician whose name was off by just one letter. Go figure.
Mufin displayed another interesting behavior. For this, I'll refer you to the earlier picture that showed three similar tracks. If all of those tracks had been playable, and I clicked the first one, mufin would not only play that one to the end, but it would play the others in order, without my needing to do any further clicking. I haven't decided if this is a bug or a feature. I will say that it did introduce me to a composer I'd never heard (or heard of) before – and when I clicked on his name on the track, mufin returned complete results for his discography. Very neat! (For you classical music lovers, his name was Skrowaczewski, and one of his pieces matched up with one of Beethoven's works).
I haven't used all of mufin's features by a long shot. Clicking on the shopping cart next to each entry, for example, lets you buy from iTunes or Amazon. And I haven't touched on mufin's social aspects at all. I will say, however, that I like the way mufin works. If I were more of an audiophile, I'd probably use it in combination with other music search engines to find tunes I haven't discovered yet. I could see mufin becoming an option or a feature of Amazon or some other large site where music plays a big role. I certainly wish it the best of luck with its unique, surprisingly successful approach.
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