Curious Fish

Wow! The iTunes plug-in Moody is amazing. Let me explain.

About a year ago I got a 250 gig hard drive, and decided to use that as my main drive for music. Since then, my music collection has been growing. However, I’ve been running into a pattern that I’m not too fond of. I’m getting hooked on about 5% of my iTunes library: the 5% that is rated or commented and added to a playlist.

I have not been too happy with that, but the alternative, spending a lot of time classifying music and creating playlists, isn’t that attractive. The real problem with it is that you have to do it all the time. That is, a song that today I rate as a 3-star song, tomorrow might, and does, get old. Ideally, I would have to update the ratings, continuously.

Enter Moody.

Moody helps you rate songs based not on quality, but feel, or mood. Moody maps moods to colors, in a graph that goes from sad/calm (bottom left corner) to happy/intense. Initially this seems odd, but I quickly got the hang of it. And I like it, because it’s not simply a measure of what sounds good, but it’s rather a measure of what a song sounds like. Which is to say, it’s more accurate and likely the evaluation of the song can better survive preference changes over time (i.e. a sad song today is a sad song tomorrow).

Further, Moody lets you download ratings from its website (Mac only feature), which is smart because not only does it save the user the time spent tagging, but it uses the collective knowledge of other users. And it works, exactly because it’s a classification system based on a song’s feel rather than quality, or faveness. In other words, I trust, generally speaking, the general public’s judgment of a song’s feel.

Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s much much better than no Moody at all. And with a little bit of care, it’s a good way to make effective use of ever-growing music libraries.