moodlogic: my review

moodlogic: my review

having downloaded, installed and then coughed up the USD$50 to activate my music through moodlogic and connect my mp3 player to the tool i was obligated to spend some serious time getting to know the software. over the last week and a half i've used, abused and generally grown to understand how moodlogic operates and how it can be useful when it comes to accessing my music collection. read on if you want my full take on moodlogic and it's devicelink technology.

i had intended for this review to be a fairly organized what's good, what sucks type post. but i got a little sidetracked and didn't really write an outline before i started rambling. so it's a little less like that, but hopefully still useful and informative.

what i have come to understand it is

moodlogic, in the most concise words i can find, is itunes. indeed, after some serious time spent with both programs in the last few months i have to say that moodlogic is a better itunes. moodlogic is the missing piece in the iriver puzzle as well; it can give you the much desired auto-playlists that ipod users hold over us as the holy grail of their own players. actually, that's a bit of a lie: it can give almost auto-playlists -- it won't enable your iriver to make the lists on the fly, but it can do a darn good job cookin' them up and sync'ing them to your device. more on the sync'ing in a bit. i have to qualify my statement above before all fifty mac users out there come down on me as mac users are apt to do when ever anyone attacks an endangered species like apple.

moodlogic has a nice, clean, simple interface to it. it is very itunes-like in it's brushed metal and candy store button look. actually, i firmly believe apple lifted more than just the spirit of moodlogic for itunes (and i can say this because moodlogic has been around for a few more years than itunes). the itune/ipod playlist generation by genre now looks clearly ripped off (maybe oem'ed?) from moodlogic. and the interfaces are strikingly similar. which i find doubly strange because moodlogic is a windows app with a mac app look.

buttons in moodlogic are few, obvious and one click does much. they have empowered the single click you could say. moodlogic's primary goal is to allow you access to your music in a non-standard, not-just-files-on-disk way. they want you to pick what you listen not by artist, or silly id3 genre, but by mood. to accomplish this task they require users to fill in their "mood database" for them. in return for answering a little questionaire about songs on your hard drive and submitting this information to moodlogic you get credits. credits can be used to "activate" songs on your hard drive, enabling moodlogic to access these tunes when it creates auto-mixes. the more songs activated, the bigger, badder and ultimately better your mixes that moodlogic generates will be.

it's the concept of "mood" that took me a few days to get my head around. not all the music in my collection works with moodlogic. tracks that aren't music, like the spoken intro tracks between songs on tom waits' album 'nighthawks at the diner' are a good example of this. because they don't have a mood, and because you wouldn't want the spoken track showing up in a mood mix without the audio track immediatly following it (something moodlogic cannot be told to do), you're better off removing these tracks from moodlogic. not from your collection mind you. you just want to tell moodlogic that this is a track it should not concern itself with. with the red herrings weeded out i found moodlogic's auto-playlist generation capabilities to be really be quite good. i've been listening to the mood+tempo lists it placed on my iriver player for the past few days and the songs are well selected. the mood well regulated. on a rainy fall day there's nothing worse than a bubble gum pop tune showing up in your melancholic play list.

moodlogic, i have come to learn, is not the way to access your music. it's a way. there are still times when i want to listen to a whole album, something moodlogic does not let you do particularly well. you have to create a custom playlist for each album and it's not easy to make sure the tracks are in their proper album track order. infact, i have a huge gripe that moodlogic won't let me sort tracks in it's display by their id3 track number tag. but when you've got a lot of music and you like your mp3 player to act like a personal radio station, moodlogic is a great way to add some simple categories to that "radio dial". i can now carry 20 gbs of music with me, plus access it based on the mood i'm in. driving the car? i'll want fast, aggressive music (or maybe not...). writing some code? i like mellow, electronic music because it makes for great background noise. whereas the iriver's shuffle function was a nice way to keep the music random, the moodlogic auto-playlists keep the music random and constrain it to mood. i find myself twiddling with the remote considerably less because a power song came on while i was coding and broke my concentration on my work.

what i now know it ain't

i can repeat myself here: moodlogic, i have come to learn, is not the way to access your music. it's a way. i don't find the moodlogic interface useful for all kinds of music. epic albums, things that really needed to be listened to from track 1 to track n and in order, they don't work well with moodlogic. when it comes album- or even artist-based browsing i much prefer the winamp music manager interface or even my own carefully organized directory structure i use for storing my music.

the good, the bad, the ugly, the awaited

first the good:

• nice, simple interface lets you quickly and easily create mood mixes.
• the devicelink interface is excellent. i really like it. it's very smart too: if you have two playlists sync'ed to your player and they both have the same song in them, the song only gets sync'ed once. it's that kind of forethought that permates the tools inner workings. as a programmer it's i can really appreciate this level of detail.
• if you're trying to access your music by mood, tempo range, year range, artist of genre it's execellent.

the bad:

• accessing your music through moodlogic by album or track number is almost impossible (you're left having to mouse over tracks for this kind of information). it's a little easier by track name but not much. they could make moodlogic a one-stop music interface if they made album and track based access less frustrating.
• sync'ing complete albums because of the above problem becomes laborious: you have to create a playlist for the album and make sure the tracks are in the right order. you'll do it once or twice and quickly realize it's deadly slow way to things.
• if you're starting out with moodlogic and you have a LOT of mp3s (especially ecclectic music) then you're going to be spending a lot of time adding the mood information to the database by hand. the good news is moodlogic "pays" you in the form of copious amounts of credits to answer their mood questionaire for tracks that aren't in their db already. infact, i could have tagged my whole collection for free based on the amount of credits i've earned submitting info to the database. consider this approach before you cough up the USD$50 for the 10k of credits. the downside is that this takes time. and it's a mouse-intensive questionaire so have some ice packs near by to help fight rsi.
• for some reason their ability to read id3 tags is limited. i'm an anal retentive id3 tagger. my tags are as close to perfect as i can get them, even for the music i've downloaded and not ripped myself. regardless of this, when updating the mood database by hand for songs, the questionaire that pops up can't read the artist, title and year information from the id3 tag (and it's there in v1.0 and v1.2 format). stupid. this should not be.

the ugly:

just one thing here: i'm torn on the interface. i'm not a mac user (although i have lamented about trying mac in the past) so why do i want a mac interface on my windows machine? it's nice and simple, but there's a steeper learning curve because buttons don't look like window-style buttons and the gui just generally doesn't behave the way i expect a windows gui to behave. for a good criticism of this mac-type interface used in apple's quicktime product see this page. it's a good read and supports my criticism of the moodlogic ui.

the awaited:

moodlogic is promising some online integration by way of "playlist sharing". i'm not sure how great this will be: yea i can see your playlist but does that matter if i can't also get the tunes? i'll make that call as the new online features appear.

the other awaited update is, well, the next version of moodlogic. because they use a credit model to pay for their development costs and make money, they give the software away for free. so future upgrades are gratuit. this means i'll be anxiously awaiting the next version, hoping it addresses some of my complaints and improves upon what i'm now convinced is a great way to access my vast and growing mp3 collection.

the summary

i could have saved myself the USD$50 if i'd realized i had enough eccletic music on my hard drive to make up the credits i needed to tag my entire collection. keep this in mind if you're thinking of trying out moodlogic. visit the profile center in the tool early on and sort on credits awarded (moodlogic gives you 2 credits if the song isn't in the db at all, 1 credit if it's there but not many people have submitted their opinion of it, and 0 credits if it's there and they have enough opinions to form a good average of the mood of the song). also, if you're considering moodlogic and your collection is currently small it'd be a good idea to get started with it now because otherwise, like me, you're left with a few evenings worth of work hand-tagging the files that weren't found in the db. at least if you start with a small collection your time spent hand-tagging will most likely be spread out over a longer, more comfortable period.

i like the tool. i like having the mood-based interface to my music. i've often wanted just the romantic stuff, or just the upbeat stuff, and now i can get at that music without having to spend any more time managing playlists as i add and remove music from my collection. if they can take my criticisms and improve the ui i think they could get pretty close to a killer interface app. make it cross-platform and you're done. i'm not regretting the loss of USD$50 dollars for moodlogic. if you have varied tastes in music i highly recommend moodlogic.