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Moodagent - a great tool for playlists

Once you start to have thousands of songs on your iPod or iPhone, if you’re anything like me you tend to find that you listen to the same few songs over and over again. It’s almost like you’re paralysed by having too much choice.

Apple’s Genius mixes are one way around this, but they tend to be rather one-dimensional. Because they work principally on the basis of genre, they can sometimes bounce between up-tempo and slow, dark songs with sweetness and light.

Moodagent (iTunes Link) is a method of creating lists of songs which match your mood. The way it works is simple: it analyses your library, matching each track against an online database of “moods”. This can take a few minutes if you have lots of songs – around ten minutes for the 3,000 or so songs on my iPhone.

You then express what “mood” you’re in by playing around with five sliders, representing five mood aspects: Sensual, Tender, Joy, Aggressive and Tempo.

The app then creates a playlist of 25 songs which match that mood. When I tested it, it produced some really good quality playlists, which managed to mix up different genres while retaining a definite theme amongst the songs.

There’s one drawback, though. Although Moodagent plays songs using the iPhone’s built-in player, it can’t (yet) save the playlists you create back to iTunes. You can, however, save the playlists within Moodagent, so your carefully-crafted list can always be retrieved.

Moodagent is free, and at that price who could argue? But if it actually cost a couple of pounds, I’d still thing it was worth it.

(Image by Parislemon)

Original Article

Richard Stallman on The Setup