14 DAY TRIAL // As music libraries grow and grow, they become difficult to handle. When you have months of music, if not years lying around, how do you get around to listen to it? Huge libraries can be daunting to work with, especially since music is often relative and depends on your mood. Genres and keywords can help you narrow down your selection of possible tracks, but they can only go so far, since they are typically applied to artists and albums, tracks being lumped together as one. Moreover, genres are not incredibly indicative and some people interpret them differently. It's a real complicated mess; however, there are some programs that are looking at the problem in different ways and coming up with surprising results. Moody is one of them.
What it does Rather than beating the dead horse of genres and keywords and whatnot, Moody takes a new approach. It lets you assign songs to colors. With an easy to use tagging method, it lets you view and enjoy your music in a new way, either at home, or on the move.
Colored Music Unlike 'hard' tags such as genres or BPS, Moody understands that a song is both complex and subtle. Moreover, since music is a rather personal experience, different people can see things differently. It works with something that is as hard to capture in words as in music, namely colors.
The notion of organizing your music based on colors might seem alien at first, but once you get down to it, it's really great. You have a square of 4, giving you 16 possible 'moods' that you can use to describe your music and you are in no way constrained in how you use them.
The developers suggest that you use the bottom side for calm music and the top ones for intense tracks, while the left columns are sad and the right ones happy. This is a general suggestion, however it is by no means a limitation. You can organize in any way you like, you don't even have to use a gradual scale from one side to the other, nor do you have to actually use up all the available 16 colors.
Easy tagging Because of the way Moody works, by adding a string in either the comments or the composer field of the track, using it is very simple. You can either use Moody itself to tag songs, or do it from within iTunes.
If you use the tagging method from Moody, you can either tag the songs as you listen to them normally, while doing other things, or you can go tagging crazy. In case you want to tag a week's worth of music in one sitting, Moody lets you do it as fast as possible. By activating the QuickTag method, every time an untagged track is tagged, the program will automatically skip to the next untagged track. Not only will it do this, but it will also jump forward by an interval of anything between 0 and 60 seconds so you can skip the beginning of the song. The entire thing is very well set up and has just the right features to allow you to get a monster tagging job done in record time. It even has keyboard shortcuts for all the possible moods so there is less mousing.
If you want to find it easier, you can also tag track from within iTunes. The way Moody works, each mood is represented by a letter and a number, corresponding to the appropriate location of the mood on the grid. From A1 to D4, it is exactly like half a chess board and all you have to do in iTunes is select the tracks that match and type in the code.
Portability Considering the way Moody works, it doesn't actually do anything to the songs. It just adds a little string to the comments to let it know what the track is like. Unfortunately, there are two possible issues with this approach. Firstly, you might want to keep the comment clean of any such strings because you have lyrics there, or something else. The other problem is that comments are worthless when you're listening to an iPod.
Fortunately, the developers thought of all this and they give you the option to use the composer field of the tags to store its information. This is good because that field is irrelevant to the vast majority of users and they can thus keep the comments as they were. Another important advantage is that the iPod can work with the composer tags.
Regardless of where you may decide to store the Moody tags, you can always make Smart Playlists for syncing with iPods.
Customization While the concept behind Moody is solid and the execution of the program is simply great, there is something that is unfortunately missing? customization.
There is no actual limitation on the color grid, so the fact that you are stuck with the 'Happy/Sad' and 'Calm/Intense' naming convention is disappointing. Why not let the user decide what they want those four corners to represent? To make things even worse, the colors themselves leave a lot to be desired. I really wanted to like those colors, but I simply couldn't. Some of those choices are really dodgy and to add insult to injury, that gradient often brings out shades that are better left untouched.
I understand why some would prefer not to bother too much and don't mind the default naming conventions and colors. On the other hand, I really want to be able to use four shades of pink and see four flavors of salsa when I mouse over the corners.
The Good A great concept backed by a great implementation, very easy and productive to use and perfect for people who see music differently.
The Bad The lack of customization is the only thing that irked me about this otherwise great piece of software. It might not be a major issue, but little things can make huge differences.
The Truth For people who hate genres and the likes, but would still like to be able to filter their music using criteria that would only make sense to them, Moody is perfect. Because it's like dancing on architecture?
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
