We've talked about automated iTunes playlist generators before, like MusicIP and The Filter, which purport to create playlists that reflect a certain mood or musical style, etc. In some ways similar, Moody also helps you generate playlists based on mood, however unlike those tools it does not analyze your music or tie into an online database. Instead it requires you to go through your iTunes library tagging your tracks according to mood along two axes: the vertical represents intensity and the horizontal represents happiness. Once your library is mood tagged (with the mood saved in the comments field of the ID3 tags), you can then define playlists (including Smart playlists) based on mood.The supposed advantage of this method is that your mood tags will be set by you, reflecting your own individual taste, etc. Thus a mood based playlist will more accurately reflect what you think of as intense or happy, etc. rather than some online database. Personally, I think this sounds like an interesting concept, but much like star ratings I don't know if I could get around to tagging enough tracks to make this worthwhile.
Moody is a free download from Crayon Room (donations requested).
[via Cool OSX Apps]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-17-2007 @ 9:38AM
jadam said...
I have been working on rating my library for some time now by setting up a smart playlist in iTunes ('my rating' is '.....', etc) and listening to it at work. When I rate a song, it goes away from the list. I was very happy about being nearly done, but now it looks like I might want to mood-rate all the tracks now too. Sigh. My quest for the perfect music library seems like a never-ending one.
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5-17-2007 @ 9:38AM
aph3x said...
Nice idea but this could potentially take forever with a large collection. Oh well, worth giving a try.
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5-17-2007 @ 9:48AM
Daniel D said...
Should be alot quicker if you tag whole albums at a time (which will sound the same anyway)
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5-17-2007 @ 9:50AM
phi said...
i blogged about this a couple a years ago. nice to see someone executing it!
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5-17-2007 @ 9:52AM
fanguad said...
I'm actually working on a similar program (Windows only ATM, but eventually I'll make it cross-platform), but the thing that will make me never use this particular program is that it uses the comments field. ID3 already has a spot to put things like mood, instead of blowing away (or at the least modifying) my existing comments.
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5-17-2007 @ 9:53AM
Den said...
Nice concept, but I'm very happy with The Filter. I'd rather tag with words than colour anyway, which I can do on last.fm
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5-17-2007 @ 9:57AM
fanguad said...
On a more positive note, I do like the idea of tagging on color. Many of my tags deal with the feel of the song already. Perhaps I'll use that idea myself.
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5-17-2007 @ 10:46AM
bruce said...
@ Daniel D
I don't think that's the case unless you're listening to really monotonous trance music...
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5-17-2007 @ 11:03AM
duncan said...
doh, this has been on my todo list for ages... oh well. one suggestion for the author. create an online database that averages out colors from all users. people's tastes vary, but you'd probably get pretty close with enough votes.
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5-17-2007 @ 12:18PM
Pete said...
Yes, and I should be able to say "I'm in this mood now and I want to be in that mood in an hour" and have it pick an appropriate sequence of songs... that way I may be able to control my mood to some extent.
Agree about the need for an online database though, it's hard to decide exactly what mood/intensity most songs correspond to and would take forever to tag them all.
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5-17-2007 @ 12:42PM
greatslack said...
It needs online database for default mood values, with the ability to overwrite them on your personal machine. Most people don't want to be a librarian and a music critic, they just want to listen to music.
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5-17-2007 @ 1:10PM
Stephen Macklin said...
Now if they could just come up with a way to connect iTunes to a mood ring.
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5-17-2007 @ 4:51PM
Avondale said...
Ok, I've wanted to get this off of my chest for some time now... and since I'm not a programmer, I'll never make this happen myself.
This idea is good, but as suggested above, it needs to be expanded upon with the use of more categories and an online database.
What iTunes needs is a plugin based off of the website www.musicovery.com. Music needs to be tagged with: Artist, Title, Album, Year, Rating, Mood, Upbeat/Downbeat, Category, even your own keywords. People would be able to create any number of mixes on the fly and tailor them to their mood in a matter of seconds.
Tie this all into an online database like Last.FM and allow users to either input their own values of every song in every category, or allow iTunes to go out to the database and download average values from other users.
This would allow me to come home one night and choose...
Slow, Sad, Jazz, from the 1990's...
And the next night choose
Upbeat, Happy, 80's music...
or even
Upbeat, 90's music by Pearl Jam...
Lastly, if I have my own tags... instead of choosing any of the above, I could simply use basic tagging to build playlists on the fly as well. Example: "Wedding + Slow" would give me slow songs to play at someone's wedding.
Build a very customized and personal playlist with very few clicks. Fast & Easy.
Now someone just make it happen! haha!
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5-19-2007 @ 12:44PM
oZ said...
Avondale: There is a program out there that supposedly does that, called NexTune. Unfortunately, it looks and works like hell right now, but if they can keep on working through it, it might get somewhere. It allows you to set all of those options on each track, and then it has a 'Mood Maker' piece that will auto generate playlists based on exactly what you're talking about.
It's still PowerPC only, though, and though it does play protected music, skips all over the damn place.
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7-14-2007 @ 2:47PM
tunesfan said...
Check out MoodShuffle from http://www.moodshuffle.com It is available for Windows XP and Mac OS X. If you use iTunes, it gets rid of the need to create playlists, it just figures out your mood each time you run it. Very cool. Oh yeah, it is also currently free. There is an ad for it on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOutlcDEEAg
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