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Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

4.11.2008

New Software Friday: Moody

Need another tool to quantify your iTunes Music Library? Well, I did. ratings are fine, and smart playlists that create playlists out of most-played, least-skipped tracks recorded in the '80s by composers with the name "Peter" in them can only get you so far.

Enter Moody.

Moody uses a 16-square grid of color cubes, representing sad and less intense (blue, in the lower-left corner) all the way up to happy and intense (yellow, in the upper-right corner). Running in "Tag" mode, you simply click on the square that corresponds to how the track you're listening to makes you feel. In "Listen" mode, click on a square and Moody plays the tracks you've assigned to that mood. So: it's a rainy friday, and you feel like listening to shoegazer music and feel melancholy? Click the purplish-gray square (row 3, column 2 for me) and you'll get some slightly intense, slightly sad music. Might not be all Cocteau Twins and Brian Ferry--in fact, most of those are probably too intense for that setting--you'll probably end up with some jazz, some blues, a few Rolling Stones tunes...who knows? And that's the beauty of Moody: a seemingly random (but not really) way of listening ot music that fits your mood exactly, because you are the one telling it what music equates to which mood.

From an interface perspective, this is a pretty nice solution, although it's not perfect. Ignoring the little intro screen that explains what the grid coordinates correspond to, I was using the Sad, Slow corner to tag grungy blues tracks...but I suppose as long as you are consistent with your tagging methodology, you could assign any two variables to the grid and have it work well for you.

I'd actually prefer an infinite number of points, more like a full spectrum, and perhaps be able to draw a vector on the space--say, from just above sad and slightly intense up through slightly happy and very intense--and then get tracks returned from all the points along the line. This would require a heavier tagging scheme on the backend and in the comments area of each iTunes track (where Moody hides its data) but I think it could be done.

Don't want to tag all of your tracks? Take the lazy-man's way out and click the "Upload/Download Tags" button. Moody will send your tags to their database, and pull down tags for songs in your library that other users have tagged, but you haven't. Mind that now you have other people telling you that Black Sabbath's "Children of the Grave" is less sad that you might think it is, but that's the price you pay for being a slacker.

It's free, with donations appreciated, and they even have a beta online player version, too.

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