Moodagent is an iPhone app that creates instant playlists from your music library for you. Of course the built-in iPod app also has this ability, and Pandora, Last.fm and plenty of others can also serve up music based on just a little input.
The big feature that Moodagent touts to set itself apart “ as its name might suggest “ is that it offers to play music and create playlists based on your mood and emotions.
I ‘ve been trying out Moodagent for several days now. Hit the jump for my quick thoughts on what ‘s to like and what ‘s not so hot in the app
When you first launch Moodagent it needs to ‘sync ‘ the music in your library. This process completed fairly quickly for me, which is not surprising as my iTunes library is still quite small “ and reported that about 20% of my songs had no matching ‘Mood Profile ‘.
Here ‘s a slice of the description of how Moodagent is intended to work to provide playlists matching your moods:
Five touchscreen sliders let you tell your iPhone how you ‘re feeling: sensual, tender, joy, aggressive, tempo. Set the sliders, or ‘seed ‘ your favorite song for music that works well together.
The Moodagent technology used to power this app measures the degree of each song ‘s characteristics, including mood, genre, sub-genre, style, tempo/beat, vocals, instrumentation and production features.
I ‘ve found that creating playlists using the mood sliders gets me some very odd results. For instance, when I set the ‘Joy ‘ slider up to the maximum and all the others down to the lowest setting, I got almost all tracks that I consider quite sad and bluesy feeling. Basically my definition of most of the mood categories does not seem to fit with that of the app.
Fortunately you can also create playlists from songs you choose from your library, just as you can with the Genius feature in iTunes / the iPod app. Whenever I ‘ve used this method, I ‘ve got fairly good results “ though there still always seem to be a few oddball items thrown in. For example, when I used Melanie Fiona ‘s ‘Monday Morning ‘ as the seed track, I got a number of songs from Macy Gray, Lauryn Hill, and En Vogue “ but then also a couple of Tom Petty tracks thrown in, which are way off for this list.
Although Genius playlists certainly have their weird moments as well, I ‘d say that Moodagent is throwing up some stranger results most of the time.
One place where Moodagent was better than Genius was in being able to create playlists based on any song I threw at it “ whereas Genius sometimes hits me with this error:
Once a playlist is created for you in Moodagent, you can save it for future use. You can also remove saved playlists via the Edit screen, though I have not yet seen an ability to edit individual playlists.
A definite drawback of the app is that your playlists are not exportable to iTunes “ so your only access to them is within Moodagent itself.
Overall Moodagent is very hit and miss so far “ but it ‘s a free app and I will likely keep it around for a bit and hope for some improvements via future updates.
Has anyone else tried out Moodagent yet? If so, what are your thoughts on it? Please share in the comments.
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TAGS: iphone apps, iPhone music apps
