Just how many times does it happen to all of us to come home or arrive at work in so many different moods, from the gloomiest "doom" depression and up to the warrior-like energetic and almighty high-spirited state...and as we sit or simply wander around we try to think of a tune to perfectly suit our current mood; eventually, we'll end up with a little bit of time spent seeking the right song or album and only then we'll keep on to our further schedule, if any.

Well, someone thought of creating a player to "automatize" this whole social process and so MoodAmp has been born. I warmly salute the idea and even if the little program is in an early beta stage, anyone can easily notice the very nice possibilities it withholds.

The Looks

The beta MoodAmp is definitely a very promising software despite its rather dull and unimpressive look due to its simple and totally WinXP native appearance. As you have already guessed, this means a grey background with usual XP buttons and very readable text on them and generally speaking, a very easy usage overall.

The MoodAmp consists of a main window but in order to operate it at full potential, you'll need to open some additional windows such as Info Browser or Catalog. The main window has 2 theoretical sections: the left which is dedicated to rating buttons and to the mood drop menu. No less than 9 moods are available to choose from and 5 ratings can be applied to each of your songs. In the right side of this main screen, the seekbar and volume bar have been placed as well as an information pane regarding the currently playing song. As you can see, everything has been designed in a very simple yet convenient way and rating or mood choosing have become quite easy tasks.

As for the other windows I was telling you about, they look as simple as you saw by now and no graphic styles (other than the traditional XP one) have been applied. The Info Browser is a fullscreen-able window in which the MoodAmp will display data regarding the currently playing track, if found on the internet. Info on Artist, Lyrics, Photos, Buying and generic links are all accessible by simply pressing the corresponding buttons. The Catalog window is, as its proper name states, a tree-view of music files on you hard drive; you can add further folders in locations of your own choice and thus manage the content indexed by the MoodAmp.

The rest of the menus are very easy to understand and use and hopefully, the future versions of the MoodAmp will bring cooler looking graphics, maybe skins according to the selected moods, color-themes and a more integrated generic operation. Far from being what we'd call an "attractive" GUI, the "face" currently displayed by the MoodAmp is full of promises and I can't wait to see a final version!

The Works

For those who have read carefully what I have written so far, the generic operation of the MoodAmp is already clear; what has this software brought in front was another way to rate your favorite songs not only according to how much you like them but also to what mood are they suitable in your case. I said from the very beginning that I really liked the idea which stood at the foundations of this program's development; I guess it's a very interesting thing to tell your computer what mood you are in and according to previous data you provided, have it play the music you once thought appropriate for the way you felt at a certain time.

Having MoodAmp started is quite an easy task even for those who have never used such software nor ever rated songs before. Basically, all you need to do is load the locations and folders containing your fav music in the catalog so that the software knows the full extent of your audio collection.

Playing a song is one operation anyone should know how to do; here comes the difference between usual rating in various audio players and their tracklists and MoodAmp: you won't just rate from Exclude, Bad, Average and up to Good or Awesome for a track, but you will also tag it with one mood you think of as being suitable. You can choose from Angry, Energetic, Happy, In love, Neutral, Relaxed, Romantic, Sad or Working – well this is one nice array of moods you'll surely pass through in time.

It may take a long time to get to double-rate all songs on your PC, but I guess you're not listening to all of them when in a certain mood; this is what the creators of the MoodAmp counted on: it's just a decent amount of songs you're playing when in a certain mood and not whole MP3 DVDs :)). And as we are at the "play" chapter, one truly great feature I had not seen in the beginning and whose absence was to rate low for the software: running MoodAmp does not mean at all that you have to use its internal player – MoodAmp will easily give way to external music players such as Windows Media Player and Winamp so everything cooled down. Of course there are some of you who do not like either of the above players...just drop an e-mail to the producers of the MoodAmp and ask for integration of support for your favorite player...maybe the final version will sport it, who can tell...

The Play Settings may look a bit complicated at a first sight but as you pay a little attention to all that's written in line with that multitude of sliders, you'll easily begin to see the big picture. I won't write down here a manual about how to set up the playing in MoodAmp but I'll just say things are really intuitive as you have to slide a cursor between the extreme values of "Never" and "Often" for each criterion the producers of the MoodAmp have considered in this window, such as: rated tracks (with according ratings), average artist rating, average genre rating. To add more interest to this section, the devs have also implemented a built-in randomizer for all the indexed tracks so if we just think of combining this internal "chaos-machine" with the shuffler in some external players, we are most likely to get rather interesting results.

Finally, the MoodAmp has a Voice option, not a very inspired one, but some users may like it: the moment a new song begins, the voice of Speech Engine will read the artist and song name, as well as the rating (if available). I personally guess that hearing that voice while in a more special mood would rather auto-set my mood to "hellishly angry" no matter the previous one, ha-ha-ha!

The Good

Excellent idea to build up such an extended rating-method with a very direct, instantaneous and empiric result! The work so far is pretty good, but I guess that further feedback from the beta testers and even reviewers like me could round up a good deal of data for the final product.

The Bad

Since the MoodAmp is still in the beta-phase, I won't criticize too much on its small inconvenients but rather make some further (and kind) recommendations regarding a more ordered display of data in the Info Browser and a more extensive catalogue and of course, a professional GUI whose presence would dramatically increase the impact of MoodAmp!

The Truth

Truth is that I am going to rate "Excellent "for MoodAmp despite its (yet) unfinished stage: this goes mostly for the original idea, the so far very good work and efforts spent and for the future possibilities!


Before you start rating and "mooding" your fav song , please take a look at the screenshots: