PRESS RELEASE
Moodagent – A Stroke of Genius From Syntonetic
SAN FRANCISCO, December 29, 2009 – After just two weeks in iTunes App Store, Moodagent is steadily gaining traction among, well, anybody who likes to listen to music on the iPhone or iPod Touch. With more than 25,000 downloads, Moodagent fans quickly pushed it to the No. 25 spot on Apple’s top music apps in just four days, and the word is spreading quickly.
UPDATE: Now in top 10 with over 25,000 downloads per day.
The fledgling iPhone app creates instant playlists based on your mood and emotions.
“Wow.” you hear your inner monologue saying to you in a sarcastic tone, “Now they’ve thought of everything.” Well let’s back up for a moment. No, your phone can’t read your mind (yet!). No need to wrap your head in tin foil to keep your phone, the government, or anyone else from reading your thoughts.
Moodagent works using touchscreen sliders that help you express the mood of the music you want to hear. You can slide them up or down to indicate the level of Sensual, Tender, Joy and Aggressive qualities you want to hear, as well as adjust the tempo of the music.
Right now, you may be thinking back to all of the ‘treasured’ moments from this holiday season that could have benefited from some appropriate music – i.e. baking cookies, dinner with your extended family, taking down holiday decorations – and wondering why you didn’t download Moodagent sooner. It may be that you’re still depending on Apple’s Genius for playlists that suit the occasion.
No worries. There is still time to download the *free* app before you ring in 2010.
Will the Real Genius Please Stand Up?
Apple’s Genius is indeed quite different from Moodagent. Let’s review.
Upon opening Moodagent for the first time it quickly syncs your collection with the Moodagent profiles in the cloud. From then on you adjust the sliders, and seconds later – bam! Instant 25-track playlist that suits your mood… or helps you change your mood (refer back to ‘holiday moments’ mentioned above).
Upon opening Genius, you are prompted to search through your music to identify a song you want to hear, so that Genius can create a list based on that song.
Hold the iPhone – what’s so genius about that?? You still have to search your music, and even after you find a song you like, Genius proceeds to play songs that may not really fit together. What’s going on here?
To start, Genius doesn’t look at the actual properties in the song you chose. It reviews the purchase history of iTunes subscribers (listeners who bought song A also bought songs B, C, D, etc.); affinity relationships among subscribers’ playlists (listeners playlists containing song A also contained songs B, C, D, etc.); and star ratings from iTunes subscribers. Since hit singles are owned by more people, especially older hits included in anthologies and greatest hits collections, they appear more often in playlists and are inevitably over-represented.
Moodagent, on the other hand, analyzes the track itself and determines the track’s characteristics by DSP (digital signal processing) and artificial intelligence (AI) to determine how the music is perceived emotionally by listeners. Moodagent makes recommendations and creates playlists based on a song’s actual content.
Genius recommends music combinations that other listeners like, including tracks that may not be in your personal library, but never recommends music for which collaborative filtering data is unavailable. Moodagent does not recommend songs you don’t already own, but can use all of the tracks in your personal music collection – no matter how obscure your musical tastes.
Still feeling loyal to Genius? Just be sure that all of your music is in English, because Genius doesn’t allow non-English tracks. Different languages, however, are no problem for Moodagent.
The Genius of Syntonetic
Moodagent, from music profiling and recommendation technology developer Syntonetic, creates profiles for every song it encounters and stores these profiles in an Amazon EC2 cloud. Over 7 million profiles have been created so far, and the 10 million mark is not far off.
To create a profile, Moodagent analyzes the digital signal of a song, similar to Pandora, takes a segment, of the song, amplifies it and runs it through a series of artificial intelligence expert systems, which are constantly trained by Syntonetic’s musicologists. From that, Moodagent is able to create a song profile that measures the degree of each of the song’s characteristics, including moods, genres, sub-genres, styles, tempo/beat, vocals, instrumentation and production features.
Still not convinced?
Let’s look at what others are saying about Moodagent:
“It creates playlists of non-English songs, which is great as I have French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese songs in my iPhone. iPod Genius can only recommend popular English songs.”
“I have a large music library (21,000+ songs) so the fraction I can fit onto the iPod Touch is all over the place. What mood I’m in dictates very strongly what I want to listen to & the genius feature was only so good at truly pin pointing the feel of a seed song. Now I get seed back with how the song is profiled, &b the seed song feature blows away what Apple offers. I actually spend time listening to songs instead of always skipping to the next, trying to find what suites me…”
“This should be the standard for organizing a music library. This is so easy and elegant.”
“Everything you thought the genius playlist would be. Two seconds to figure out, and an eternity of musical bliss. WIN!!!”
“I have long wanted an app that finds me tracks based on mood. Here it is. Thank you.”
“Absolutely excellent app – most useful in the app store.”
“Moodagent is a terrific App. Function backs appearances. I was pleased to find the music continues to shuffle the 25 songs even when exited.”
For a limited time, Moodagent is available at no cost in the iTunes app store.
About Syntonetic
Syntonetic delivers powerful solutions for leading mobile device manufacturers, mobile operators, online music businesses and streaming music services, and provides applications direct to consumers. The company’s intelligent applications automatically decode unique properties within songs, including moods and emotions, to create new music services that attract and retain users, and applications that change the way people listen to music. More than 1,000,000 customers from 187 different countries have synced over 1 billion songs to create instant playlists based on moods and emotions. Syntonetic offices are located in Frederiksberg, Denmark, and San Francisco, Calif., and can be found online at www.syntonetic.com.
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