FMFinder Review

There are so many songs nowadays that it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest hits. Even when users keep up with the top charts, they still miss out on music that suits their tastes. FMFinder is a music discovery and recommendation app that sets out to help solve these issues, but its cumbersome interface may turn some users away from utilizing it.

FMFinder has many options available when it’s time to look at music recommendations. Users can select the now playing item, a song from their iPod music library, top last.fm songs, top iTunes songs and even top iTunes videos. It’s possible then to filter by searching for songs by name or artists.

Once a song is selected, the app pulls up 16 similar songs that are displayed as nodes on a web with the song name or artist underneath. The algorithm is based on criteria like similar artists and composers as well as rhythm and listening preferences on last.fm. Tapping on one of the nodes opens a new screen that lets users watch a video preview of the song, view related YouTube videos, browse the song facts and even purchase the song or video on iTunes. If users wish to view even more related songs, there’s a view related button which creates a new web graph.

As much as I wanted to love FMFinder, there were a few issues that prevented me from doing so. The first is that the app crashed on multiple occasions when opening up my song library. It was rather frustrating having to open it up multiple times in order to get a song selection to work. Next, the interface needs work to make it look more appealing. It’s hard to read the small text on the web graph on the iPhone, and the iPad interface oddly places the YouTube videos in the upper portion of the screen and cuts off the related videos. Lastly, the YouTube videos don’t always match the song suggest. For instance, I tapped on “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” by Travis Tritt and ended up listening to a song with a similar title by P!NK.

With such blatant issues, it’s hard to recommend FMFinder until an update addresses the issues above. Despite these annoyances, it still isn’t a completely bad app. It does suggest new music and it aims to make the process convenient and easy. However, it seems like it may have been released a little too early as this feels more like a beta than a polished app.