Crayon Room Blog

Spring em up

Crayon Room — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:12:51 GMT

It's pretty calm over here, as you can see.

Just wanted to say that Moody passed the 100.000 downloads mark a while ago. Fun! We felt like kiss and tell at the time, but now years later - here it goes:

"Awesome app - I'm addicted!"
Kevin Rose

"I like that it's simple and can really put a filter on your entire library."
Chris Bell, Director of Worldwide Marketing iTunes

Both the Screensaver and Moody is still being downloaded, so everything's good.

Mattias is very active at his recently started computer game related business, and I'm webbish at http://earthpeople.se, watch out for exciting projects coming up there. Got something good up our sleeves.

Best best

also - go here and get peel http://beem.se

/ Fredrik Mjelle

New screensaver out and about

Crayon Room — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:16:28 GMT

I have changed the download link on the screensaver page to a new (beta) version. The old version does not work with iTunes 8 and also doesn't play all that nice with Vista, so there was really no use in holding back the new version anymore.

New features are:

* Works with iTunes 8.
* Works much better with Windows Vista.
* Possible to alter the font size in currently playing mode.
* Improved stability for slimserver.
* Possible to use alternate location for iTunes library.
* Double buffering can be enabled to get rid of flickering problems.

If you encounter problems, the forum is there to help you.

Enjoy!

/Mattias

Moody 1.0 is out!

Crayon Room — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:05:33 GMT

Lots of new stuff. Be sure to watch the new screencasts. And then start twittering about your favorite tracks!

Moody Shuffle - an interfaceless shuffler

Crayon Room — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:47:54 GMT

EDIT - April 27: This is now removed, since it will be included in the next version of Moody (which is finished and soon to be released!)

A possible future Moody feature would be a status bar thingy of some sort. Many have expressed wishes to use Moody in a more transparent way, without the extra window.

So, try this little fella out:
~~www.moodyapp.com/files/MoodyShuffle.zip~~

That is a little status menu item that only does one thing only. It stays in the same mood as the last song.

If it's running it checks if the current song playing in iTunes has a Moody tag and if it does the Shuffler jumps to another song in the same mood at the end of the track. If you skip manually or double click another track it does nothing. It only works in the end of songs.

So with this function you can just play a song in iTunes and be in mood play directly.

It's pretty simple still. No app icon (except for the shuffle icon in the menu bar), and ~~no deactivation~~ - Edit: I put up a new version with a "turn on/off shuffle" menu choice, however no indication on the icon whether it's on or off. Think of it as a beta test of the function.

Enjoy!

/ Fredrik

No iTunes integration for 3rd party apps on the iPhone?

Crayon Room — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:08:29 GMT

I haven't seen this on any US site, but Swedish MacWorld says that 3rd party developers won't have access to the iTunes content on the iPhone. I don't know if they have confused iTunes with iPod, but they say it'll be impossible for last.fm or ilike to get information about music play out of the iPhone/iPod Touch.

If you know swedish, heres the link:
http://macworld.idg.se/2.1038/1.151935

Edit: Here is something on this, from ipodNN:
http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/08/03/19 ... phone.sdk/

This doesn't make it impossible for Moody to exist on the platform, but maybe with a lesser experience.

I saw us on the roadmap

Crayon Room — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:16:16 GMT

Yeah, we're totally SDK!

What an awesome presentation, and what an awesome life we all gonna have from june on (first Euro08 soccer championship and then this).

(But wasn't it really lame when he started with talking about "we launched Web applications as a way to build web applications for the iPhone")

/Fredrik

Moody Online Player

Crayon Room — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:42:00 GMT

We're now quietly introducing the Moody Online Player.
It's still in developing, but usable. Try it out here:
www.crayonroom.com/moodyplayer

The player picks songs from the Moody Database, look for them at seeqpod.com and plays the urls that are found.

Pretty nice.

The Future (plug)

Crayon Room — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:05:49 GMT

All three of us make or have made music in different ways. A few days ago I released a new album that's free to download at www.beem.se. It's mainly electronic music but I also made a cover of the lovely Television song Days. Here's a video.

Enjoy! / Fredrik

Piling up

Crayon Room — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:25:09 GMT

The total number of downloads is now 56889. That's not at all taking-over-the-world-numbers but still great. Somewhere here and there people actually have had a better music listening experience because of this, and that makes us pretty happy (a dollar per download would not have been bad either though).

Here's to another 56889!

Fredrik / CR

Forum launch

Crayon Room — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 11:23:10 GMT

To give better help and support to all we set up a simple forum.
Follow the link >

ooooonline!

Crayon Room — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:40:04 GMT

Now there's a new mac version of Moody out with tag download and upload.

We hope that this tag sharing thing is gonna be great. At the moment there aren't that many tags in the database but it surely will grow, so hopefully you'll be able to download tags that works for you soon.

So, welcome to the soc.. uh.. well.. Share on!

Fredrik / CR

If you tried the online feature very early you can continue reading. The first 20 hours might have been a bit shaky, there was a bug in the web app that made Moody seemingly freeze if a song title only consisted of numbers. If you then made a force quit you might have damaged the preferences file. If so, search for a file named com.crayonroom.moody.plist and just delete that and you'll be fine, except for the loss of your settings. Sorry about that.

Tags go up and down.

Crayon Room — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:10:02 GMT

We are now working on a small and neat solution for up- and downloading tags to a database. Actually we're pretty much done, and you can expect a release for the mac users quite soon.

There's no login, no community, no go to a website, just a tiny little button with arrows. Click on it and you'll download and upload tags to and from the selected tracks. Hopefully a kind soul has uploaded the tags you miss and vice versa.

This will of course only work if you use a system for your tags that is reasonably close to the official happy-intense scales, but if you're very personalized you won't need it anyway.

How good this will actually work remains to be seen. If everybody has different opinions on how a track should be tagged it will be like straight shuffle. So while it still may not beat your own homegrown tags, hopefully it will be a good second option.

Fredrik / Crayon Room

Album Art Screensaver and Windows Vista

Crayon Room — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:40:32 GMT

We have received a lot of emails lately regarding the Album Art Screensaver and Windows Vista. When running this combo, any changes made to the settings are ignored once the screensaver starts up.

Worst case is when you have a different image source than the default (iTunes), and want to specify something else. Since the settings aren't applied properly the screensaver will not find any artwork at all!

We will fix this problem as soon as we can, so keep an eye out within the next few weeks for a new version.

Peace

/Mattias

Yeah sure i'd tag my 850+ gigs.

Crayon Room — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:03:10 GMT

Some people have talked about Moody and said that they would love to use it, but the idea of going through all their 40k songs isn't that appealing. And although we are discussing ways to share or download tags in a smart manner, we really think you're the best judge. Tagging is so relative to your taste and collection.

I use Moody not only for moodtagging but as a different way into my music. I have around 8500 tracks, and I've tagged about 2000 (which took me 2.5 hours in total). I got a lot of songs that I want to keep, but I don't want them popping up all the time in daily listening. This way Moody just gives me the good stuff.

I'm sure you all have your own approach to your collection (and to Moody). Leave a comment if you wanna share yours. I'm premiering today with a big iTunes library on a network drive with all my stuff in, and a smaller library on my MacBook Pro for new and hot stuff (and podcasts), to sort, tag and listen through before they can come into the big library. It's not perfect though, it would be better if iTunes could sense if removable drives are missing and hide those tracks. With fewer tracks you get much better overview and Cover Flow is more fun to use. And new tracks with bad tags easliy goes MIA in a big library. We'll see how it goes.

Fredrik / CR

iPod Touch!

Crayon Room — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:23:10 GMT

The new iPhone-like iPod is out, and we love it. (Well we haven't tried it out yet of course, but you know.)

Finally there's a possibility for applications on the iPod.

Exciting!

We are up n' runnin'

Crayon Room — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 18:19:22 GMT

Moody for Windows!
New version for Mac!

Could life be sweeter?
Life could not be sweeter!

/ the Cray Boys

Hang in there!

Crayon Room — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:53:42 GMT

Just around the corner now.

- Moody and iTunes for Windows and OSX side by side in Parallels.

1983!

Crayon Room — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:08:59 GMT

Set it off - Strafe. Recorded in 1983 (!) Strafes version of �Set if off�must be the coolest song ever.

When I hear music - Debbie Deb. It�s easy to hear that Madonna has been heavily influenced by the way Debbie sings. This song should be played on all dance floors this summer (and the next..)

Martin / Crayon Room

Windows and more features

Crayon Room — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 08:49:51 GMT

We are currently working on user definable colors and tooltips, that's the next set of features.

After that: A hot key / status menu option, for fast in and out tagging of the current track.

The Windows version is far on it's way now and a beta should be out in a couple of weeks or so!

Filter tip

Crayon Room — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:27:45 GMT

A small Moody tip:

If you go to the *Moody playlist and then do a filter search on a genre, say country, you can listen to only the country songs of that mood. Even if you switch mood the filter stays put.

Which can lead to an error.. if you don't have any country songs of a certain mood and try to play that mood. Well well. Expect a fix on that.

Panther and a bug

Crayon Room — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:11:18 GMT

Small update out yesterday, just a bug fix.

There is a working version of Moody for Panther - OS X 3.9 too now.
It can be downloadable from here >
(Edit: It may still got some bugs in it, please report if you use it and experience any problems.)

There are some spam in the comments, so we'll try an antispam thing, see if it has any powers.

Also, just want to make clear that just because we don't answer all the suggestions in the comments doesn't mean we think they suck. Some of the stuff you've suggested here are great features that we're discussing or planning on including in future releases.

New version - 0.1.1

Crayon Room — Sun, 27 May 2007 17:02:15 GMT

There's a new version of Moody out!
To download it, just start Moody and an update window will pop up.

Changes in this version:
- Quicker respons on playback and tagcount.
- The Quicktag Needle Drop now includes half track time.
- Skip track permanently when quicktagging.

Moody now creates a set of playlists in a folder to increase handling speed. The difference is quite huge, especially for big librarys. Hope you'll love it!

Read more in the online help section >

Fredrik / Crayon Room

Laughing it all away

Crayon Room — Fri, 25 May 2007 06:00:51 GMT

Joni Mitchell - People's Parties

MoodyC3

Windows version is on it's way!

Crayon Room — Sun, 20 May 2007 16:59:40 GMT

Windows users, let go of your frustration. Moody is coming.

Top Of The Pops

Crayon Room — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:42:25 GMT

Finest track at the moment: Arcade Fire - Keep The Car Running
Great great song, I think it's a
MoodyA2

Moody User Review

Crayon Room — Wed, 16 May 2007 08:25:40 GMT

I read this user review at Macupdate.com that was pretty interesting. The reviewer didn't really like some aspects of the concept, but went on using the app with his/her personal rules.

The arrows with the Sad-Happy things are there as a guide, to keep people from feeling confused. I hope that those who feel limited by the words do exactly as the reviewer and just close that little window and make up their own rules. I love that, I myself have developed a relationship with the squares and know what songs i put where, and that's really the point.

We love the idea of a personalized experience with software, as opposed to the more lazy approach to have the app autotag the songs or pull down some readymade tags from a server (although this also might be a future possibility if solved in a smart way). Music is a pretty personal thing.

Read it here

/ Fredrik@Crayon

New version finally out!

Crayon Room — Mon, 14 May 2007 10:20:08 GMT

It's been over half a year since the Album Art Screensaver was released. Finally there's a new version available, with lots of improvements.

First of all the installtion should be a lot simpler. The installation wizard lets you define all that is needed, no more right-clicking on "scr" files and other clumsy solutions.

Another neat thing is that the screensaver can display info on the currently playing track in your music player. This works for iTunes 7 and SlimServer and looks very nice if I may say so myself.

And finally as you might have already noticed there is support for the SlimServer. This is the server software that is used with the sweet litte Squeezebox. If you have not heard of it I suggest you check it out at:

http://www.slimdevices.com

Enjoy!

/ Mattias

Hello World!

Crayon Room — Sun, 13 May 2007 12:07:05 GMT

We are very pleased to release Moody today, together with a new version of our Album art screensaver.

Moody is a nice little gadget that really can change your music listening if you let it. Tag your tracks with moods and then listen to the smoothest shuffle mixes you've ever heard. No more bumpy roads.

It takes some effort to tag all the tracks if you got many (and you probably do since you're here), but it's so worth it. I tagged my first 1100 tracks in an hour and a half, that's 5 seconds per track, pretty fast thanks to the quicktag function. Take a couple of hours to go through some of your good stuff with the quicktag function. Then you can tag along as you go with quicktag turned off.

The screensaver has got some new functions, it now supports Squeezebox, and it also shows album art and track info of current track. Mattias can talk more about that.

Hope you enjoy the stuff, you got links to the right. And leave a comment if you got any thoughts or if you find a bug or two.

See ya soon!

Crayon Room Blog

Spring em up

/ Fredrik Mjelle

New screensaver out and about

Moody 1.0 is out!

Moody Shuffle - an interfaceless shuffler

/ Fredrik

No iTunes integration for 3rd party apps on the iPhone?

I saw us on the roadmap

/Fredrik

Moody Online Player

The Future (plug)

Enjoy! / Fredrik

Piling up

Fredrik / CR

Forum launch

ooooonline!

Fredrik / CR

Tags go up and down.

Fredrik / Crayon Room

Album Art Screensaver and Windows Vista

/Mattias

Yeah sure i'd tag my 850+ gigs.

Fredrik / CR

iPod Touch!

We are up n' runnin'

/ the Cray Boys

Hang in there!

- Moody and iTunes for Windows and OSX side by side in Parallels.

1983!

Martin / Crayon Room

Windows and more features

Filter tip

Panther and a bug

New version - 0.1.1

Fredrik / Crayon Room

Laughing it all away

Windows version is on it's way!

Top Of The Pops

Moody User Review

/ Fredrik@Crayon

New version finally out!

/ Mattias

Hello World!

Fredrik@CrayonRoom