Clean Up Your iTunes with TuneUp

Posted on 18. Dec, 2008 by Kyle Judkins in Software, Windows

How to Use TuneUp

TuneUp works like a plugin for iTunes. After installation, just open up iTunes and you will see the TuneUp sidebar on the right of your iTunes window. In this sidebar, you can clean up your mislabeled music, find missing cover art, explore information about the song currently playing or find out what concerts are coming near you.

Features

Cleaning up your labels and finding cover art are the main features of TuneUp. In order to clean up your tracks, just drag them over to the sidebar, and let TuneUp do its thing. Finding album covers are just as easy. Just tell it to search for the missing covers, then save all the covers you want.

The features that I didn’t expect are the ones that come into play after you’ve cleaned up your library. When a song is playing, TuneUp will search various sites and sources for videos, concert tickets, similar artists and several other things. This keeps you up to date on all your favorite bands, and it might even help you find some new music as well.

You can also input your location, and TuneUp will let you know of all the concerts coming to your town. This is a great way to stay in the concert loop for your town.

Performance

To tell you the truth, I’ve always been a little skeptical of iTunes cleaning programs. This stems from my protection of my vast music collection. It wasn’t perfect before TuneUp, but it was all in one piece. Call me paranoid, but I don’t want to mess up such a large collection.

It turns out all these fears were unwarranted. TuneUp worked flawlessly for me. It fixed all my mislabeled songs, unorganized albums and missing album covers. Finally, I was able to sue cover flow and not get a question mark every third cover.

Conclusion

I really stand behind this product, because it does work as advertised. My precious music collection is not only still intact, but it got a shiny new pair of shoes as well. If you only have a small collection or just need a few album covers, the free version is perfect. I must say that for the larger jobs, the paid version is well worth the $20.

2 Responses to “Clean Up Your iTunes with TuneUp”

jim wilson

20. Dec, 2008

i have used tuneup since its beta testing days and have the following comments:

1. If you tried tuneup before and were not impressed with the speed, especially of the cleanup, try the latest version. The latest version’s performance is impressive.

2. Do NOT trust the cleanup recommentdations of two types of albums/cds: (1) best of and (2) compilations. I think if is obvious why these might cause problems. I’ve found that it is best not to try cleaning up these types of albums.

3. Cleanup provides a much more granular typing of genres than anything else i have used. For example, I have many Brazilian tunes in my library of 7000 plus tracks. Depending upon where you downloaded them, these tracks tended to be labelled reggae (emusic) to latin (almost all others). Tuneup properly types these. Jazz tracks are also properly typed into genres such as bop, modern jazz, etc.

I highly recommend this product — it has gotten nothing but better since its beta days.

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Carbon

25. Dec, 2008

I wonder if there is a similar plugin/software for the zune software? That would be something I could really use!

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