I discovered another playlist generating app called Groove. Compare to Moodagent, while gave you more control when creating the playlist. Groove give you more choices instead but with little control. Groove get the music information from Last.fm and then generate a playlist that go well together. Well, that’s kind of standard right? and Moodagent can let you control what can be in the playlist and if you don’t like something you can delete the individual songs. The uniqueness of Groove is all the other choices it offer that are based on your listening habit. There is a Favorites playlist, which i suppose it is your favorite songs, I have yet to figure how it knows – either from your metadata of rating or play count or from Last.fm. There is a “Three of a Kind” playlist, which play sets of three songs by an artist, then switch to three songs by another artist. It is a pretty cool concept and it works well. Another playlist choice is “Artist Duo”, which find two similar artists that go well together and play their songs one after another like a great jam session! There are also “Artist Picks” which randomly shows an artist and you can listen to all his or her songs. “Album Picks” works the same except for albums. You can delete songs that you don’t want to hear and you can even re-arrange the song order in the playlists. But what Groove essentially give you is idea, because as our music library grows with the bigger capacity of the iPhone/iPod Touch, sometimes you don’t even know what you want to listen to and you don’t want to just simply shuffle. It take a different direction than Moodagent where you can actively participate at the creation of the playlist. But you still have to choose a seed song or a combination of a mood. It’s certainly appreciative to have that option, but what if your mind is completely blank on that day? Which happens to all of us, you just want someone else to choose it or suggest it for you. Groove give you a step better than the Genius feature in the iPod app.

I have been getting into the habit of using both Groove and Moodagent depends on what I feel like for the day. If I have a particular song or a mood in my mind, I would use Moodagent, if not, I’ll open up Groove to see what it suggest. With these two apps, It makes listening to music on the iPhone much more enjoyable than on iTunes itself on the Mac or my trustworthy 160 GB iPod Classic. If only there is a bigger capacity iPhone that can completely hold all my music…

Related posts:

1. Moodagent
2. A Letter to my iPod
3. Thoughts on iPod Classic
4. Oh Genius
5. iTunes Remote app

Tagged: Apple · Apps · Groove · iPhone · Music