Nifty.

That’s about the best way to describe Moodagent. This app ($4.99 in the App Store) will take all your songs, catalog them and assign them to one or more categories (up to 5), then you can select your mood–sensual, tender, happy, or angry, then select the tempo. All of this selecting is done on color-coded sliders. The higher you slide a particular mood, the more songs of that type will be added to a playlist. The playlist can be up to 50 songs, but the default is 25. 

With the new 2.0 version of the app, you can tweet or Facebook your playlist. I *love* that. I’m a big fan of sharing what I’m listening to (though once it got me in a bit of trouble with FB friends who wondered why I was posting every 3-5 minutes, “I’m listening to ‘X’ by Y,” but that was a different app, iShareTunes). I’m also a monster fan of helping others discover new music. Others better than I have done it for me; the least I can do is return the favor. “Pay it forward,” as it were, only with a musical twist.

There is a music profiler that you can download from their site, both for PC and Mac platforms, that allows you to “speed up” the process. I’ve noticed that quite a few of my songs (read: a few thousand) weren’t catagorizable because they weren’t in the profiler’s database, nor could the program cull the information from the internet. I’d say about 90% of my items were cataloged. Pretty good, considering the amount of indie and foreign/world music I have.

Things I’d like to see in future releases:

• Longer playlists. Really, 50 songs is good, but it’s really only about 3-4 hours of music, if that. If all you have is Weezer, then it’s probably about an hour and a half of music. 🙂 And sure moods can swing in that 4 hour span, but … meh. At least it’d be another option.  
• Better cataloging. This has to be a no-brainer. 90% is good, but … when you have a 30000-song repository, that means you’re lacking 3000 tunes. Not good. That’s approximately 300 CDs. WHAT?! Yes–you read that right. 300 CDs not cataloged. So, again, 90% is good. 100% … yah. That should be the target. Always (again, a no-brainer).

Other than that, it’s a *great* app. I like selecting the “angry” mood with the slowest tempo possible. I get some seriously brooding, bruising tracks. Conversely, selecting the “happy” mood with the fastest tempo could very easily cause me to swerve off the road from the sheer energy.

For example, here are the first 10 tracks that Moodagent selected for me, based on the “angry” mood being all the way at the top, and the tempo being set to the lowest setting:

• Autolux – Turnstyle Blues
• Phaser – Life and Illusion
• Muse – Microcuts (a personal favorite)
• Adult – Contagious
• Land of Talk – Magnetic Hill
• The Beautiful Confusion – Rain
• Xandria (Casablanca)
• Krypteria – Victoriam Speramus
• The Music – Guide
• The National – The Geese of Beverly Road

Here’s an uptempo happy playlist:

• Niyaz – Arezou
• Vas – Moshka
• Mike Oldfield – Sunjammer
• Nouvelle Vague – Dancing with Myself
• Von Iva – Birds of Prey
• Of Montreal – Oslo in the Summertime
• Niyaz – Golzar
• Dido (don’t judge) – Us 2 Little Gods
• Straylight Run – Untitled
• Azam Ali – I Am a Stranger in This World

Anyway, for all you iPhone users out there, get this app. I think it’s well worth the $5 it costs. There is a free version, but the only difference is that it’s not ad-supported. In other words, annoying ads appear at the top of the app. If you can live with that, by all means, download the free version. I loathe ads, so I ponied up the $5.