Music lovers now have another online tool to help discover new music from artists you may not be familiar with.

The Mufin algorithm takes tempo, sound density, harmony, instruments played, and 36 other characteristics into consideration which it uses to find similar music. 

"As soon as a song has been indexed it can be instantly recommended even if no one has ever heard it before.  An unknown artist can be recommended alongside Coldplay if the songs have similar metrics," Mufin President Juergen Jaron said in a statement.  "It all comes down to the music."

The cataloging process for a new 10-to-20 track album typically takes two or three days before it can be entered into the system.

Mufin, or music finder, was created at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital  Media Technology, which is the same organization that developed the first MP3 player compression algorithm.

It's possible to use the Mufin homepage to search for songs, or the MySpace widget, with a Facebook widget in the works.  The social networking widgets let users check out what their friends are listening to, and share musical discoveries with other users who have the widget installed.

During random testing by CDFreaks, we found the database worked fairly well, but there are a couple of problems the Mufin team needs to work on. 

We searched for common song names and found numerous matches, though many of them were in foreign languages, which may not be helpful for our English only speakers.

It would also be nice if Mufin explained why it chooses similar songs, as some results were so obscure that even Google had a hard time identifying the band.

The digital music world is overly complicated due to licensing issues with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and there are some licensing questions that need to be addressed by Mufin.

Mufin is working with the Universal Music Group and The Orchard, but quite a few song recommendations are brought up without sound preview clips.  This is likely a problem the site is working on right now, but it's still a minor annoyance, even in private beta.

Mufin is now in private beta -- you can gain access to the beta program by clicking here