How It Works

Each tag  in Moody creates a corresponding playlist in iTunes, so you don't need to use the Moody app to play your color-coded songs, although you can. You can name these tags anything you want, like "Dance" or "Mellow" or "Rockin'," depending how how you decided to categorize your music. Tunes can be labeled while you're listening to music, so you don't have to sit at your computer for hours tagging - you can just do it little-by-little, over time.

However, for some people, their music collections are far too large to tag items one by one, so there is an option to download tags (moods) for their tunes from the Moody database (for Mac users only).

Your tagged music can be ported over to your iPod as playlists, or, if you want to actually make the tags visible in your iPod, you can choose to put the tags in the composer ID3 field instead of the app's default of the comment field.

Color Coded Web Radio

I found Moody's color-coding is very much reminiscent of the Musicovery web radio service where you can discover new music based on how you feel. At Muiscovery, color-coded songs and a "mood matrix" help you narrow down your musical preferences while you begin exploring new tunes in a visually appealing way. You use the  "mood matrix" chart to click on what mood you are in: energetic, dark, positive, or calm or anywhere in between. You can even select or unselect the boxes next to the various musical genres like rock, rap, latin, soul, etc. so you will only be presented with songs that match your preferred styles. The songs appear in a visual display where they float around the screen connected to each other based on their tempo and their positive or negative lyrics. The color-coding lets you easily see which songs are from which genre.

 This month, the team behind the Moody app, quietly launched an experimental online player of their own, which is more like what Musicovery offers, except a much simpler version.

The player itself looks just like the Moody app. It works by querying the Moody database to determine mood and then searches for the tracks using Seeqpod. Since the tracks are from all over the internet, the quality can vary from song to song. This web player is still very much in alpha, but fans of the uncomplicated Moody app will love it.

Oh, and in case you're curious, the team at Moody has figured out the color of love - you would think it's red,  but apparently it's more of a yellow/greenish color. Who knew?