Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Commercial, Beta
Mp3 cleanup utility TuneUp comes out of private beta
by Nancy Messieh Jul 15th 2008 at 11:30AM
If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning. Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.
TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
robotrock said 12:11PM on 7-15-2008
I was one of the beta testers and damn if it wasn't sluggish and buggy. I know that's how betas are, but I was just a few builds removed from GM so I'm not sure they were able to fix the massive memory/slowness issues.
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Smiley said 12:36PM on 7-15-2008
Ummm...no mention of MusicBrainz? (http://musicbrainz.org/). New and improved Picard version suggests albums but lets you drag and drop to the correct one if you know better than it does. Similar issues with highly obscure artists and bootleg recordings. Uses FreeDB rather than grace note. Takes any directory or file, not just ITunes. Nothing I've found is perfect, but I really like the flexibility if musicbrainz.
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Rocketboy said 2:07PM on 7-15-2008
And, Winamp can do the same thing and is free...
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John Reznik said 7:16AM on 7-16-2008
Unfortunate that this service uses the Gracenote database with all of its inherent quality problems. Gracenote already does a fine job of messing up my tags in iTunes, why would I want to have it screw them up again using TuneUp? I would prefer something that uses the allmusic.com database. Is there any service like this that uses allmusic.com for cleaning up tags?
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JRez said 7:26AM on 7-16-2008
Do NOT allow this app to "clean" your files unless you have plenty of time to go back an hand fix all of your tags. Great concept, terrible execution. What a waste.
Why didn't the developer use a better source for data? Gracenote is crap-ola.
Rocketboy, Winamp uses the same crappy database so you will do no better with that alternative.
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ronmoses said 10:41AM on 7-16-2008
What does "up to 50 or 60" mean? If it's up to 50, the 60 part is incorrect. If it's up to 60, the 50 part is meaningless. Unless you're saying you can drag anywhere from 1-50 songs, or you can drag 60 songs, but you can't drag 51-59 songs, or more than 60. And that's just silly.
It reminds me of those ads that say you can save "up to $100 or more!" Meaningless.
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