Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

Provides: iTunes media cleaning
Format: Download
Developer: TuneUp Media
Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS 10.5+
Processor Compatibility: Intel only
Price: $11.95/Year or $19.95/Forever
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 1.0 (Gold)

According to TuneUp Media, your music collection is in dire need of cleaning, and they’re probably right. Good news, they have a utility to do just that, and it works “Automagically.”

TuneUp runs on the side of iTunes and works with it to fix your library’s messy and missing meta data. It fixes cover art and meta data (things like track names, artists, album titles, genres). But that’s not all; TuneUp also finds music videos, related auctions on ebay, artist news, Amazon music recommendations and local concerts for songs that are playing in iTunes.

TuneUp’s window has four tabs: Clean, Cover Art, Now Playing, and Concerts.

Clean is where you’ll spend most of your time. Here, you can drag your filthy songs to TuneUp to clean them up.

Chances are high that your mother still won’t like them, though, since it won’t clean out any of that dirty language you youngins seem to like to listen to so much.

One of three things will happen after you’ve dragged songs to TuneUp. It will be labeled as a Match, Likely Match or Not Found. Match represents a correct match 99% of the time, while Likely Match is correct more than 80% of the time. Each album has up to four choices for album art. First, make sure the meta data makes sense for the songs that you fed it, select the best looking match for the album art, and hit save. The songs will be tinted blue until the saving is complete. It’s really that easy.

TuneUp Media claims that TuneUp can clean about 85-90% of your Library, which I’ve found to be a pretty good estimate. There will always be a few songs it won’t get, especially if you have sound clips or music from local bands, etc. Still, 85-90% is pretty decent when you consider the work involved with fixing album art and meta data by hand.

That said, the utility doesn’t always work perfectly. It won’t always find meta data, and it may not be able to find album art for everything. Sometimes it will find correct meta data and the right album art, but when you select that album art icon, the larger preview has an error and does not display the right picture. I’ve also had a few cases where the meta data actually started out correct and ended up wrong after TuneUp “fixed” it. This was probably more my fault for not checking all of my songs and blindly allowing TuneUp to fix everything I fed it. Still it only happened with a handful of songs, so it safely fits into the 10-15% that TuneUp can’t (or shouldn’t) help. I’ve also had a few instances where album art was not updated after TuneUp ‘saved’ it’s changes. Even with these issues, I think the program is very good.

TuneUp is primarily for tidying your library, but there are other features. It can find concerts with artists in your library when they are in your area. It can also find music videos, merchandise and artist news. All of this works as expected and could be a great way to find concerts with minimal effort. Though, in the end, I don’t see myself using these other features since I probably won’t bother to run the app when my music is clean.

I’d recommend TuneUp for anyone with a library in need of help. Whether you need album art or correct meta data, TuneUp can help. The iPhone and iPod Touch both display album art while playing music, so it’s useful to have it be correct. If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or are envious of Cover Flow working the way Steve Jobs would demonstrate it, then you might need this utility. Yes, there are a few issues, but fixing meta data by hand is a tedious and semi-painful process, so the benefits outweigh the issues. Plus, this program is already a stellar offering for being version 1.0.

There is a free version of TuneUp available to test out. It’s limited to 500 song fixes and 50 album art fixes, which may actually be enough to fix the problems in your library. A word of advice for those with particularly messed up libraries, just buy the “Forever” version. This version doesn’t cost that much more than a license for a single year, and basically protects your future music purchases.