TuneUp is a an iTunes add on that cleans up your music library, adding track information and cover art. TuneUp was created for music lovers, by music lovers, and it shows. It is everything I have been looking for, and a cheaper better alternative to paying someone to update my music collection by hand using my iPhone and Shazam.
My experience with TuneUp was great. I used it on my PC, that has about 4500 songs, many missing or incorrect track information and even more missing or incorrect cover art.
The install was super quick and easy, when I open iTunes TuneUp is attached to the right. There are tabs at the top to select to clean tracks or cover art you then then drag and drop tracks in the window and TuneUp starts to do it’s magic. In the sidebar the songs are analyzed and you have the option to save all changes, or go through the list and confirm each one before you save. I started out checking each one and I was impressed with TuneUp’s accuracy so I started saving all changes. I have a few rare tracks and cover songs from artists I did not even remember but TuneUp was able to identify these right away! Adding cover art was accurate too! It takes about 2 minutes to analyze each song and you can clean hundreds of songs at a time. It’s best to walk away and came back later to look through all your track updates.
How does it work? As the fine people at TuneUp put it “TuneUp ‘listens’ intelligently to your tracks by analyzing the audio waveforms and using characteristics like beats per minute (tempo), frequency range, average power in each frequency band (spectral flatness), and acoustic resonances to fix your metadata. This is commonly referred to as acoustic fingerprinting.” It is available for both MAC and PC, with three options to choose from. If you are skeptical or cheap you can try the free trial version that lets you clean 100 songs and 50 cover arts. The other options are for $19.95 one year of song and cover art clean ups, or the best value package $29.95 for unlimited clean ups. Watch a demo here.
I’ve just tried the gold version and it was terrible.
Long story short: Picard, an open source free software, does exactly that, it’s faster, easier to use, got better results (with my library at least), and more functionalities like organizing file names and directories structure or providing ways for you to choose the best match.
Picard just lacks a polished interface design with eye candies but it is really much more clear to use.
TuneUp was horrible to use! It seemed slower than anything related I tried before; it stalled many times (using it with WMP); suggested not to try more than 500 files at once (I had 9000); had to syncronize its library with my player many times; sometimes just couldn’t fix the tag with different kind of errors; didn’t provide basic functionality like not choosing any cover if all were wrong; it didn’t provide alternatives to matches (many were wrong); had no option to rename files; didn’t handle compilations well; and so on. Besides its interface is really counterintuitive and the fact it tries to dock itself besides the player bothered me a lot.
I thought TuneUp was going to be more magical and require less manual work than Picard but it turned out Picard is better in every aspect!
Great! It is available for both MAC and PC.