Text-based tagging provides an good method for categorizing your music but is often labor-intensive. Additionally, iTunes does not provide an efficient way to tag your music.  Moody is a desktop app for the Mac (PC version coming soon) that provides a mood-based approach to creating iTunes playlists. Moody presents you with a color grid that spans from sad to happy on the x-axis and from calm to intense on the y-axis. While you listen to a song in iTunes, you click the appropriate place on the grid to “mood-tag” the song. Moody also provides a very useful Quicktag option that will skip ahead to the next song as soon as you tag the current song.



You can listen to mood-playlists directly through moody. When in Listen mode, you just select one or more moods you want and press play. Moody also creates a folder of smart playlists directly within iTunes so you can access your mood playlists in iTunes and sync them with your iPod. You can choose Moody to store the tags in either the comment field or the composer field. Storing in the comment field just adds the mood tag to your existing comments but storing to the composer field will overwrite the existing information. Unfortunately, the playlist names are a bit difficult to decipher. They use an alphanumeric designation based on the grid, but there is no reference to which axis is which.

Moody’s strength is in its basic approach, elegant UI and ability to quickly tag your collection. While the calm/intense and sad/happy designations may not work for everyone, most users will likely imprint their own mental model on the grid. That being said, it would also be nice to have user control over the colors because colors mean different things to different people. Two variables keep things simple, and the resulting playlists are actually surprisingly good. However, I don’t feel two variables provide enough granularity and control for the time investment to tag my entire library. I would prefer a UI that had a variety of sliders that contained more music qualities like fast/slow, male/female, vocal/instrumental, solo/orchestra, etc.