Download Squad

One of the things that technology should be able to help us with is to figure out what we really want, and give it to us. While that may sound like a tall order when you think about the entirety of it, when applied to specific scenarios, it makes sense. For example, Amazon can give you some pretty good ideas about books you might like to read based on your previous buying habits.

Along with book selection, another area that is ripe for picking with respect to automated selection is in the generation of music playlists. And while it's easy to have iTunes to create a playlist consisting of your favorite music, it's not so easy to have it automatically create a playlist of music that suits your mood, be it melancholy, neutral, or ecstatic.

If this is something you've wished was easier to do, check out Moody. Moody is a little utility that allows you to tag your songs very quickly and easily based a two dimensional grid of 16 squares. You simply choose the square that best represents the mood of the song you are listening to. The y axis of the grid represents the intensity of the music, from calm at the bottom to intense at the top. The x axis represents the emotion of the music, from sad at the left to happy at the right. Each axis has 4 possible positions, for a total of 16 squares.

You can tag songs as you listen normally, or turn on a QuickTag mode which will start playing each song from a position you choose (say, 40 seconds into the song), and jump to the next song as soon as you make a mood selection. This allows you to tag a lot of music very quickly.

While at first it can seem overly simplistic to try to pick one square that best represents a song, the choice of 16 squares appears to be a perfect amount to cover the majority of your music. The playlists that you can then generate using Moody are quite consistent in terms of the mood of the music, since you were the one that decided how that music made you feel. It can be very comforting to be able to choose a selection of music that suits your current frame of mind, without having to think too much about it.

Moody is a free Mac download, and one that we are happy to heartily recommend. We just wish it had a square for snarky blogging music.