• Basic concept

    The purpose of Moody is to filter your iTunes library according to mood, so that you can listen to music in a certain mood independent of artist or genre. The color patches are placed in a square where the bottom row represents calm music and the upper row intense music. Left to right we have a sad - happy axis. So melancholic quiet tracks are placed to the lower left and intense joyful tracks up to the right.

    If you rather would want to use some other system for the colors feel free to do that.

  • Download tags

    If you click on the two arrows up right in the main window you connect to the Moody Tag Database, to download and upload tags to and from your tracks. You can down/upload from several tracks at once, just select them in iTunes. If only one track is selected and there is a track playing, Moody will down/upload tag to/from the playing track. You can disable the warning by clicking in the box down the left of the dialog window, but if you have more than 300 tracks selected the dialog window will still come up.

    We recommend you to tag as many tracks as you can by yourself, to get the best tags for your library. But hopefully the online database will be a great source of relevant tags too. The downloaded tags are placed in a playlist in case you want to review them afterwards. New: The earlier .d.-tag is now removed and those tracks are added to the download playlist when you're running Moody 1.0 at the first time.

  • Moody Helper

    New: There is a small status bar application called MoodyHelper that takes care of the tag down- and uploading, as well as a few other tasks. It will launch automatically when needed, and you can choose to keep it open if you like. When connecting to the database Moody will stay fully accessable and the progress of the Helper will be indicated by showing which track it's working on - "Track 14 of 150". Helper delays the actual writing of tags to minimize interupted playback.

  • Auto download/upload

    New: The Moody Helper app can automatically find and share tags if these menu items (found in the status bar menu) are checked. Any time a track is playing Helper checks if there is a tag available online, and shares your tag if you have one that isn't already shared.

  • Customize colors and rollover text

    You can choose your own colors and mouseover text for the color patches. Go to the Color & Text menu.

    New: Color is chosen with a color picker that appears and then a color is applied to a patch by clicking the patch.

    New: You edit the text tags by clicking the mood you want to edit and type your tag into the text field. There is a menu choice for making the text tags visible (and invisible if not checked). Text tags are visible in the bottom left of the main window when hovering over a patch or when a song in the corresponding mood is played.

  • Quicktag

    You might wanna tag tracks in different ways. If you listen to a song that you want to tag you can just tag it and keep on listening. If you rather sit down a couple of hours and tag a lot of tracks you can turn on Quicktag in the settings panel (to get there click the icon to the upper right in the main window). New: You can quickly turn off Quicktag by click on the "Q" that appears before Tag On/Off button.

    What Quicktag does is three things:
    - It skips to next track when you have tagged a track.
    - Not only that, but it skips to the next untagged track. So if you are among a lot of already tagged tracks you can see itunes start running through the playlist a bit. If you do this in a playlist with hundreds of tagged tracks you might have a hard time stop the process. Moody will stop itself at the end of the playlist or on the track where it started. This feature means that Quicktag prevents you from tagging tracks that already has a tag.
    - Not only that, but it skips a few seconds into the next untagged track and starts from there. To avoid 10 seconds long intros and save some time. Exactly where to put down the needle on the record you get to choose yourself. In settings you have a slider called Needle drop time, it goes from 0 to 60 seconds, and then to half the track. If a track is shorter than a fixed time it gets skipped over. The 1/2 track setting never skips a track.

    If you click play when you have Quicktag enabled you start from the selected track in iTunes, or from top of the window, and it starts playing the first track that is still untagged. If you don't want to tag a certain track you can click skip. You can also hold down the alt/option key and click the x-button that appears, to skip the track permanently. Then it won't appear in playback and will be skipped over in quicktag, until you tag it again.

    If you don't have Quicktag enabled you get a warning if you try to tag a track that is already tagged. You get a few seconds to click Ok if you wanna replace the old tag. New: There is an option in settings to remove this prompt, which affects quicktag too. The present tag will be overwritten if you click a new tag.

    The music can sometimes pause for a second when tagging. This is iTunes writing in the file and it can happen when you change a tag directly in iTunes too. It happens more often if you access your music over a network.

  • Batch Tag

    New: If iTunes is not playing you can tag several tracks at once. Just select them and tag.

  • Erase tags

    You can erase a tag if Quicktag is not enabled. When your song is playing, click on the track's mood and you'll get to remove it.

  • Moody playback

    Moody creates a playlist called *Moody, in top of your regular playlists. When Moody starts to play a mix, iTunes doesn't select that window by itself, so it can appear that the music is coming from nowhere, but if you select the playlist you can do everything you like with it. Reorder it, use Cover Flow, filter it etc.

  • Always on top

    New: The Main window can now float on top of other applications, look for the option in settings.

  • Intro window

    The intro window can be hidden at startup, go to settings (upper right icon in main window) and there's the checkbox.

 

 

 

  • Twitter support

    New: Moody can display song related comments that you've twittered. Twitter like this:
    @moodyapp Artist - Song; Your comment
    If you want to twitter about the song playing right now you can go to the Moody menu and choose "Copy song info to twitter" or simply hit command+C when Moody is the active window. Then paste the info into your twitter client and twitter away. A few minutes later you and everyone listening to the same track will see your comment in the Moody window.

    The three most recent tweets for each song are saved. For the tweets to be visible you have to checkmark the "Show tweets" in the Moody menu.

  • Shuffle when song ends

    New: This is one of the MoodyHelper features and is found in the status bar menu. This is a simple and nonintrusive way to play your moods. Keep the Helper open when closing Moody (you find the option for that in the Moody main menu), and check the "Shuffle when song ends" menu item. When a moodytagged song is reaching it's last seconds of playback the Helper will shuffle to another track in the same mood. This way you can just start playing a track that you feel for and Moody Helper takes it from there. Everything works as usual if you skip or play another track. But if a song reaches it's end, MoodyHelper stays in the same mood as right now.

  • Rating

    New: There is a hidden way to change your iTunes rating with Moody. Hit command+5 to give the current track a five star rating. 0 to 5 is working, where 0 of course removes the rating.

  • Play track from one playlist only

    If you click in the bottom right of the Moody window you can choose from your playlists (among those who have tagged tracks in them), and then play tracks from only that playlist.

  • Undo

    There is an undo function when tagging. Click command+Z if you just tagged a track and regret your choice, then Moody jumps back to the last track and you get to tag it over again.

  • Shortcuts

    You can use keys to get to the color patches in Moody. The patches are placed out to the left of the keyboard like this:

    When you have chosen your moods in listen mode you can hit return to play. You can also get to the small iTunes controls with keys 8 (skip back), 9 (play/pause) and 0 (next track). In tag mode when skip is visible you can hit " - " to skip, and return works for play here too.

  • Count tags

    You can rightclick on a mood to see how many tracks you have tagged with that mood, plus your total number of tagged tracks.

  • The tags - MoodyA1-D4

    The actual tags are placed in the comment field in iTunes, and in your files id3 tag, added to the old information if there was any. The tags are called MoodyA1, MoodyB1 etc. The letters stands for the row and the number for the column, like this:

    This can be good to know when using your tags in your iPod.

  • Place tag after existing comment

    There is a choice in settings to put tag after comment. If you want to sort your tracks by your old content in your comment fields you can check this and the "MoodyA1" etc ends up in the back of the tag field.

  • Change id3 tag field

    Moody can put your tags in two different id3 fields. Comment is the default field, with your tags added to the previous information. You can also choose to put the tags in the composer field. This can be an option if you want to keep your comment fields intact or if you want to use your tags better in an iPod, since composer is visible in iPods. If you do this Moody will replace your composer info with the Moody tag, since tags like "MoodyA4 Schubert" and "MoodyA4 Bangalter" will appear as two separate list items in your iPod and therefore will be useless.

    If you want to change id3 field you go to the "Moody" menu and "Choose id3 field...". You can change id3 field from comment to composer or vice versa. Moody will then move all your tags from the old field to the new.

    With a big library this can take a while. If you want to save a little time and don't care for the other information in your comment tags (it will be erased!) you can do this manually for every tag (MoodyA1 etc.) in iTunes. Just watch your steps... Restart Moody and it will recognize these changes.

  • Update your tags

    If you work with several databases or have tagged music from a different computer on the network your tags in iTunes may not be updated. The tags are present in the file but the iTunes database still got the old information. This will solve itself during playback, iTunes rereads the tags when playing. If you want to force an update you can do the following:

    1. Select in iTunes the files you want to update.
    2. Right click and select "Get Info", and the iTunes multi file tag editor opens.
    3. Do not check or change anything, you don't wanna mess up your information, just click OK. iTunes will then reread your tags from the files.

  • iPod tags

    If you want to use your tags in you iPod, you can either do the changes above in "Change your id3field", or you can make smart playlists for each tag.

    If you have untagged tracks in your iPod you may want to copy tags from your library into your iPod tracks. Then you can select the iPod tracks that you want to copy tags to, and choose "Copy tags to selection..." from the application menu. This is still a bit rocky and takes some time, so we put in a limit of 150 tracks at a time.

    This works not only with iPods but with other sources as well. You might be updating an album to lossless and want to copy the tags to the lossless files.