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Mufin, a music recommendation service we looked at a few times in the past, just released a stand-alone music player for Windows that combines some of the most interesting features of Mufin's online service and iTunes plugin into one coherent desktop application. While it looks and acts like a standard music jukebox, Mufin Player's most important new feature is that gives you a new way to manage and sort your music collection based solely on the similarity between songs.

Thanks to MP3s and the Internet, we now have millions of songs readily available to us with the click of a button, but, paradoxically, this has often made it even harder to discover new music to listen to. Every online music store and every social network that focuses on online music, however, now features some kind of music recommendation system, and some services like Pandora or Slacker Radio are indeed nothing else but highly sophisticated music discovery engines. In this post, we will look at the different approaches behind some of the most popular music recommendation and discovery services.