NORIBORI  This app combines a boring and a faszinating idea. I tried to use it in my own way and found it has potential.

The boring idea: Sorting music/moods in two ranges between calm and intense and between sad and happy. One could make a little app with two sliders to do that. But who would want to sort his music that way? Who would want to select music that way? It’s just too dull.

The fascinating idea: “Moody” doesn’t use sliders, it uses a color grid. That’s much better, because colors are much more complex than two sliders. That introduction window explaining the two ranges is good enough to explain the idea - but then you better forget it.

When I tried “moody” I found that only the pure colors red, blue, yellow and green clearly relate to calm/intense, sad/happy. The mixed colors are different, they have their own life. They don’t express “half calm/half happy”. They actually express different complex moods. It wasn’t easy from the beginning, but after a while it became more and more easy for me to sort my music by those colors. After an hour of sorting and listing I was pretty sure about most of the colors, and the resulting playlist were really good. But - there were some colors I just couldn’t relate to. They didn’t speak to me. I never used the ocher colored button, I began to hate that color. I finally opened the resources of “moody” and changed the color of “mood10.png”, making it more brown. Much better! And all those dark blue greens in the bottom row - they are much too similar. One of them could be lighter, more cyan. I loved that grey button, btw. But is there really no place for a pink or black one?

So I found that using a color grid is a good starting point, but there should be ways to change the colors. And maybe even ways to change the grid - by adding new buttons, by allowing me to push the buttons a bit around. In my opinion musical moods don’t exactly fit into a rigid grid.

But I wouldn’t have tried “Moody” if I wouldn’t have loved its look. Very clear and fresh. Everything is easy to understand. It’s fun to use. There are clever solutions like the “Quicktag” option. I trust this app. The developers really should go on with it, they really have something here.

Try it. It’s much more complex and interesting than you might think!  
(Version 0.1)

YULETIDE  Sorta like Beatunes, but free...

Though the beatunes implementation is a bit weird. I like how it can automatically assign color tags for me tho... (beatunes, that is)

The prospect of having to go through and actually tag all my stuff by hand keeps me from really going for this though...  
(Version 0.1)

CNURRE  I like it! - This is something I have always wanted for iTunes

My only two wishes would be that the scale was presented on the main window instead of the intro window and that the scales were out of 5 instead of 4.  
(Version 0.1)