The music discovery market is heating up, and Web-based service Mufin has just unveiled a standalone music player to better compete with iTunes’ Genius feature, Pandora, and the rest of its opposition. The Mufin Player wraps the company’s self-professed unique music discovery tools into a typical desktop media player, so Ars donned some headphones to compare Mufin’s engine to the current kings of music exploration.

Currently only available for Windows XP and Vista, the Mufin Player does exactly what one would expect on first run—it begins scanning the local drive for music to import (an iTunes import tool can bring along your playlists as well). Once the process is done, you are then presented with a fairly standard music player UI, and Mufin’s discovery tools—based on what are now fairly common criteria like rhythm, tempo, sound density, and instrumentation—get to discovering. Start playing a track, and a “Similar Music” bar above the player controls will present similar tracks either from Mufin’s database or from your own library. Throwing a bit of a wrench into the experience, however, is that clicking to find out more about an artist or purchase a track (if that is even possible) opens up a window of your default browser—not a different area of the Mufin Player.

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