Germany
Very
good
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mufin player pro - Google Maps For Music On Steroids
Tested version: 1.5.7
Latest version: 1.7
Requires Android: from 2.1
|
Summary
Our latest App of the Week is all about music. With mufin player pro you get a radically new approach to organizing your music collection thanks to an unusual display and layout conception. Find out if music player pro can really improve your music listening experience in today’s thorough and thoughtful review.
Test video
Features & Use
Section rating:
Once you’ve got the 4.79 MB sized app successfully installed on your phone, you’ll be asked to click through some permissions and other typical post-installation nonsense. In an effort to drum up excitement and hype around the app, the developers greet every new user with a statement describing the app as “Google Maps for music on steroids”. Sure does sound intriguing, right?
Before you can get to all the fun stuff, there’s a good deal of welcome screens to click through. After reading through and agreeing to the licensing agreement, you are greeted with a straight-forward “Don’t Panic!” Start button. And what comes next? A slide-by-slide introduction to what the app actually does. The muffin player pro designed for Android is basically your connection to a private music universe composed of your songs and arranged visually according to their sound on an interactive map. Holy crap! Sounds freaking awesome, but it isn’t exactly the easiest concept to wrap your head around.
To start creating your own personal musical galaxy, you’ll have to follow these three simple steps:
- Connect to the Internet
- Load song profiles from mufin.com
- Enjoy your tunes!
If there any songs that cannot be found, you can analyze them with the PC mufin player or save them to your online music hard drive. It’s not exactly self-explanatory how this works in practice, but I’ll spill the beans about that later.
Ready to dive into your own musical galaxy? First off, the app automatically scans through all the music on your SD card and analyzes it with mufin’s online database. It takes the app just under a minute to go through all 188 tracks located on my phone. Regrettably, mufin managed to recognize just 62 of mine. The rest of the “unknown” apps can now be analyzed with the help of the PC mufin player.
Heading over to the developer’s homepage you’ll noticed that mufin player is the child of MAGIX, a company known for making software such as Music Maker and other. Cool beans!
Disclaimer: you don’t need to have the PC version of mufin player installed in your computer in order to use the mufin player pro Android app. But opting to download the PC software does give you quite a few advantages.
The mufin player also comes with a free cloud storage service. Every new user gets 2GB of storage for free, but additional storage can be purchased. To find out all the detailed offers, conditions and prices click here. Since my objective is to review the app, I won’t spend any more time talking about the PC version.
Back to the app: after all of your music has been analyzed, a small demo starts up showing you how the app works in detail.
- Songs: the screen is made up primarily of small circles, each one representing a different song. The circles are arranged based on how similar they are to one another in terms of sound and style. Tap a song to start listening.
- Mufin-Button: Located in the lower right hand corner, clicking this button will automatically generate a track that goes well with the one you are currently listetning to.
- Artist Button: Use this button to display all tracks by the same artist.
- Album Cover Button: Open all the tracks in the same album by clicking on this button in the top left corner.
- Zooming and navigating around the map: Using finger gestures you can zoom in and out of the screen. There are also + and – signs available for your convenience.
- Filter Your Music Collection: On the left side of the screen there is a tab with which you can filter and organize your music collection. You can filter your songs based on: latest added, last player, most frequently played, artist album or name and song length.
- Arrow Button: Located at the very bottom left, this button gives you access to a full overview of all your music. Here you can sort your music according by track, album or artist. It is also the place to search for songs and artists.
- The music “galaxy” at the center of the app is broken down according to several different attributes. You can adjust the different categories in the Settings of the Android pro version.
The X and Y axis of the music force field are determined on the following scales:
- Synthetic – acoustic
- Low on percussion – percussion intensive
- Calm – aggressive
- Low vs. high sound density
- Dark or bright sound colors
- Male or female vocals
And since we’re already on the subject of Settings, I should also mention some of the other important options. In the same menu you can connect to the mufin.drive cloud service, update song profiles, view stats, repeat the demo-tour, read more about the mufin player and much much more.
The only thing that bothers me about the player is the fact that the mufin player pro displays only the tracks it recognizes. But I do understand that not every single obscure track is listed in the app’s database. When connecting your smartphone is connected to your computer, you can run the PC mufin player software which will have no problems correctly identifying everything in your music collection. That’s definitely impressive and allows you to place all your tracks on the wonderfully designed galaxy.
Bottom Line: Based on my observations, the app is reliable and all of the main functions work splendidly. For music aficionados, this app offers an unconventional way to listen and discover new music which can be customized to fit your current mood. On the whole, the app feels like Last.fm (and you can scrobble with the mufin player, too) except for the fact that it uses your own music collection. It’s a wonderful app and I am now using it on a daily basis as my default music player.
Screen & Controls
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The mufin player pro has a lot to offer and manages to display your music collection clearly and without any clutter, especially if you’ve got an Android with a large screen. Both the controls and layout were awesome on my Nexus S. With the pinch-to-zoom function you can fly around your “music universe” despite the fact that some of the circles are sometimes located right on top of one another. After an initial period of getting used to the app, you’ll notice just how easy it is to access all of the features and options.
Speed & Stability
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The mufin player pro app is very stable and did not crash during my playtime with the app. It takes next to no time to load songs and cover art. In general, the app runs smoothly and even the song analysis is anything but slow.
Price/Performance Ratio
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Under normal circumstance, mufin player pro will set you back €1.99 in our App Center, which is a fairly decent price. But as our App of the Week, you get the unique chance to download the same app at just half the price. For just €0.99 you can enjoy the full awesomeness of this app for less. For those of you unwilling to commit, there is always the free version albeit with limited functionality.
Comparable Apps
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Review "mufin player pro" from Dec 27, 2011 (French)
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mufin player
mufin player is a unique player, that offers great possibilities for music lovers to (...)
mufin player is a unique player, that offers great possibilities for music lovers to (...)
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^^previous comment should be deleted°^^