Pollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.

It's wonderful that iTunes will now automatically search for and add album art to files that are missing it. However, it can only add art for albums that it has artwork for, and while its library is vast, the iTunes Music Store certainly doesn't have everything.

When you run into a song or album that iTunes is unable to find art for, what do you do? If you're not sure and you're on a Mac, check out Widget Foundry's Amazon Album Art Widget. It will quickly perform an album art search on Amazon.com's servers, which tends to have some of the albums that are missing from iTunes, for whatever reason. It's still not as good as TuneSleeve on Windows, but it's dead simple and certainly works well.

Some of the best comments from the recent How to fix your iTunes album art post pointed out some 3rd party tools that are available to make importing album art easier. My favorite of the bunch so far is TuneSleeve. Here are the design goals the developer used to create TuneSleeve:

• Being able to work with albums, not individual songs. We're talking about album artwork after all, aren't we?
• Being able to choose what artwork I want among all possible results found on the internet, because the CD cover for an original edition is not always the same as the 20th anniversary special edition.
• In addition to automatic searching, being able to launch an external search in my browser and manually choose the artwork I want by dragging it from my browser to TuneSleeve.
• Being able to download artwork for my entire library or a specific playlist.
• Being able to exclude songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, since they already come with good quality artwork.
• Being able to exclude songs that already have album artwork, as I might already have spent some precious time manually finding and dragging album cover images for these songs.
  
• Being able to replace existing artwork with the downloaded artwork or to add the downloaded artwork to the existing one, because the software might find a better quality album art than the one that is already there.

In practice, it works exactly as advertised. TuneSleeve is the most straightforward method to quickly scan for and add album artwork to your music files. TuneSleeve requires the .Net 2.0 framework

I recently learned a little trick that helped me to fix the artwork that was associated with the songs in my music collection. Over the past few years, I've used a number of different artwork importing tools, with varied results. Although for the most part everything was fine, I began to find that the images that were coming up for some of my songs were completely incorrect. At first it didn't concern me too much, but when it reached a point where one in five songs had the wrong album art, I started to get annoyed.

My first thought was that since iTunes now affords the ability to automatically import high-quality album art images, I might as well take advantage of that fact. So I finally jumped through the hoops that Apple makes you jump through (namely, signing up for an iTunes Store account with a valid credit card - no matter, since I don't intend to buy anything), and I was finally able to check the little option to automatically download missing album art. Of course, although this will help me gather up the missing bits, it does nothing to fix the ones that are currently wrong.

One of the best things about iTunes is that, for your 99 cents a song, you also get album art, and properly (if not always completely) attributed songs. When I first started using the service, I'd already, uh, seen people using Napster. All those songs were great off p2p, but the ID3 info was often wrong, missing, or janked up. Worse, no pretty pictures of the album. Now Artie - The Strongest App... In the World! comes to the rescue. How? Artie finds the appropriate album covers in your iTunes library, fetches them, and neatly associates them with your songs. Other apps do this, but Artie automatically resizes them to the proper dimensions, saving you drive space... Artie doesn't stop there though (why just look at the full title, it wouldn't just pull pictures would it?). It'll also remove the lame track numbers that often prefix music from those alternative sources. There are other features, but my favorite is the "Make album art playlists." Artie analyzes the cover art, and groups songs based on similarity of their covers, thus forming a playlist. Odd, isn't it? But strangely fun and interesting.