March 24, 2009

I have tried out several of these programs, and have never been too impressed with anything I have found. I found this one tonight, and figured I’d give it a whirl.

It is amazing.

It made some pretty lofty claims on the website, so I decided not to go easy on it in my testing.

Your music collection is a mess.
TuneUp fixes it.
Automagically.

It was a quick download, and an easy install. It integrates into iTunes well (it gives you an extra window on the side of the original iTunes window, as well as a system tray icon.

You get 100 free “cleans” on with the trial, so I decided not to waste them. I have many tracks that have no more meta data than simply “track 1″ (no artist, no title, nothing). I selected several of these, and drag-and-dropped them into the TuneUp window. A few seconds later, it popped up with track information for me to verify before saving it into my files’ meta data. It has a convenient play button for you to play the track that it is referencing (in case you forgot which one you dragged in), and lets you cancel or clear for each individual track.

After confirming that it has found correct track info, you simply hit “save”, and TuneUp proceeds to add album art and complete track info (artist, album, year, track, disc, genre). It appears that upon initial clean it doesn’t automatically rename/move the file itself, but after restarting iTunes the files had been taken care of.

Out of the 30 or so tracks that I tested with, there was only 1 that TuneUp didn’t have a guess for, and about 3 or 4 others that were wrong. The company claims they have about a 85-90% correct rate, so my findings weren’t unexpected, but considering that I selected tracks that I had no expectation of the program finding, I was incredibly impressed. It (not surprisingly) works even better when you do whole albums at a time, which is another thing that I wasn’t doing.

In short, this is a piece of software that I am incredibly impressed with, and would definitely consider purchasing (it’s $19.95 for a year, $29.95 for life). Of note, the license is only good for one computer – if you use it for more than 1500 cleans, you cannot transfer it to a different computer.

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