Do you know Moodmixer?

(released 06/08/2004 7:53 pm)

Imagine you had a device that automatically selected music for you as you would have selected it yourself!

Don’t we know it all? You now have a few hundreds or thousands of music files on your PC, enough software to catalogue them, sort them and administer them and of course more than enough players but you still have to put Playlists together by hand!
If you are beyond 25 you might not have the time or are simply fed up with selecting music so instead you make do with whatever is being played randomly or stick to albums.

Of course there is software with which you can search for all songs of a certain Genre and produce a playlist from it, but as soon as you need more than one genre... Especially annoying if you just wanted to quickly fill up your MP3-Player with a nice playlist but haven't got any time.

One of the newest invention is software that uses fingerprinting for musicrecognition and can thus categorize music for you. Companies such as Moodlogic, Gracenote or Fraunhofer are either already using or just inventing it. Goal is to fill up the users music library with additional information without him having to lay hand on it

But what exactly is the use? Predixis for example analyses your music and you can then put together custom playists ( by hand) or let the software select similar songs. Would you always want to listen to similar songs in a row?
Itunes has a rating system which allows the user to tell the software which songs he likes best- so you can automatically select all your favourite songs for a playlist ( but what happens to the second or third best?). The same goes for Windows Media Player and other playersoftware.

What if you wanted to listen to a nice mix of
Pop/Rock and Soulmusic, preferably from the 80s or 90s which bring you into a bestter mood? Or how about a good mix of 50s and 60s, a bit of swing, all with a bit more tempo to it?
There is no solution to that, is there?

There is.
Spending two years of development PWsoft, located in Hamburg, Germany have developed a tool that solves exactly this problem:

Moodmixer automatically selects Playlists according to personal, combinable criteria
Basis of these Playlists is either the whole music collection, single folders, Albums, or so called “smart lists” that are being updated whenever music is added to the library: i.e. all Pop/Rock or Soul songs from 1970 up to 1989.

Now Moodmixer is allowed to select Songs from one of these lists, but takes other settings into account: you can narrow down the selection with other criteria that can be assigned freely to each song by the user: Tempo, age, energy and mood are some of the mostly used criteria.

Butt he clue of the Moodmixer selection is ist pereference rating: Each song can be rated – the rating value along with a few other factors decides on how often and when a song s being played/repeated. If you had given one of your songs the highest rating value- how often would you want it to be played? Good question. of course more often than the second best or any of the others. But of course not so often that it soon starts getting on your nerves. Moodmixer displays a high sensitivity for the desires of its user as well as the tolerance for repeated songs.
You will always feel that it selects your favourite music most of the time but it also plays all other songs- even those that you might have forgotten otherwise

A few optional rules prevent artists repeats, too short or too long songs, too huge jumps in tempo and takes care that a songs that has been played the prior day will not be played around the same time today. A functionality that might even be very interesting for Restaurants, hotels and holiday resorts. All in all it always produces the perfect mix, that always varies and hardly ever repeats (unless you own just a very few songs).

Moodmixer has two modules: The mixer which produces a kind of non-stop streaming but where you can use slider controls to change the settings for the selection and the music instantly changes with the new song. Need a bit more tempo? Sinply pull up the matching slider and let’s party. That could bet he salvation of any party.

The playlistgenerator generates playlists for a chosen length- in order to play them right away or burn them or copy them to a MP3-player. If you need a playlist for three days- no problem!
And if there is an event you want to schedule music for- you can do that also- the mixer will start it at the desired time.

At the moment you can get Moodmixer as Winamp-plugin (30 days trial shareware – 11,59 EUR).

If you don’t like Winamp or you don’t like the software design- please be so kind and ask the developers of your favourite software player to get a licence fort he music-selection component to be incorporated into their software. Developer mail to info@moodmixer.com

We are planning the connection to one of the huge databases so that even our users don’t have to categorize their songs themselves- watch for updates.

Moodmixer is compatible to all 32bit Windows-OS: win ME/ NT4/2000 and XP

For all Systems except XP you have to install the Microsoft database component MDAC 2.8(or higher) and have one of the newest (>version 6) Flashplugins installed.

The complete softewaresetup ( incl. All components and a detailed online help 23 MB) can be downloaded at http://www.pwfischer.de/MOODMIXER/Downloads/MMSetup-komplett.zip but there is also the minimum installation(some will still need MDAC) with only 8.5 MB in the download section:
http://www.moodmixer.com/Downloads/DLeng.htm

You can find more Info, a detailed description and lots of screenshots http://www.moodmixer.com
You can mail Pwsoft : info@moodmixer.com