Moodagent App Works With Your Mood, Builds Awesome Playlists

If there’s one thing that you have to love about iPhone apps, it is the creativity that some of them exude. You have really well-made interfaces to really well-made apps that really work the platform. However, there are some apps that work really great when it comes to doing certain basic things in our digital lives. Some organize your finances and some organize your music. Moodagent doesn’t necessarily organize anything and neither does it give you information. Instead, it builds playlists based on your mood and it does it really well.

Moodagent does something that I have been doing manually for quit some time now and I know you folks do it too. We all have our special playlists. There’s one that you listen to for getting pumped before a big day. There’s one you listen to when it’s been raining all day and you feel a sweet sadness creeping over you. Other days you just want to relax but feel a tinge of that sadness or the remnants of an exhilarating day. We all want our music to match how we feel but alas — we have too many moods to make manual playlists for. Besides, our music collections are huge.

This where Moodagent shows its brilliance. It is this nifty little app that has a very simple interface that hinges on five sliders. These sliders represent five moods — Sensual, Tender, Joy, Aggressive and Tempo. You adjust those sliders and it automatically creates a 25 song playlist based on your defined mix.

The songs are of course profiled in advance and there is even a desktop app called Profiler that runs on Mac/PC desktops and profiles your collection and then syncs the data to Moodagent on your iPhone. Even though Moodagent can do this on its own on your iPhone, it might not be able to decipher certain tracks and the Profiler is suggested for this.

Moodagent uses the the Genius Playlist algorithm but instead of choosing one song that matches your mood and letting it do the rest, you actually indicate your mood and let the app do the deciding. According to the PR I was sent, this app is actually being used by researchers who are working with people who have trouble expressing and understanding emotion. Since it comes naturally to most people, we actually tend to undermine the underlying complexities of human emotions. And professors are apparently fascinated that this little app can actually decipher all the subtle nuances of emotion in music. It is now being considered for use as a teaching aid for such people.

So how accurate is Moodagent? Not 100% of course, it is still an algorithm. But it is still really good and will get songs right most of the time. Moodagent currently contains 7 million songs in its database but that is nothing compared to all the music available digitally. Also, it cannot work with DRM files. It restricts the playlist to 25 songs, I would like that to be taken off (possibly it is coming in a premium version?). Both the app and the desktop app are free to download.

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