The Best Tool to Organize Your Broken iTunes Library – TuneUp

So if you’re anything like me, you get you’re music from any source possible.  More often than not, this source is completely unreliable and does a number to your iTunes library.

I recently had a chance to review TuneUp, a program for your Mac or PC that automatically “cleans up” your iTunes library.  Now, like many, I feel the coolest part of my iPhone is the ability to flip through the album covers when in landscape mode.  Unfortunately, due to the lack of accurate resources (see paragraph 1), I was often searching through a stack of iTunes music notes.

Of course, if you don’t have the cover artwork, you can have iTunes search the store for the artwork, but again, this was often prevented due to incorrect song titles, album titles, or an unnecessary “The” before a bands name.  Who has time to fix that?

I thought I was doomed to forever have an iTunes catalog of unorganized, improperly titled, cover-less songs.  Until today.

TuneUp installation was a breeze.  And as “Third World” Timmy will tell you, I am the LEAST tech savvy person around.  I have trouble logging into this blog.  Anyway, the concept is easy.  Once you install TuneUp, you choose what you are trying to do: Clean Your Mislabeled Music, Find Your Missing Cover Art, Explore Your World of Music, & Never Miss Another Show.  I’ll start backwards and work my way up.

Never Miss Another Show

Based on the music in your library and the location you set, TuneUp notifies you of upcoming concerts in your area that may be of interest to you.  While I currently have the unfortunate luck of residing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I could definitely see this as being my best friend if I were lucky enough to be back in Dallas or Chicago.

Explore Your World of Music

Based on the current song playing, TuneUp has a little pop-up window which lets you completely delve into the realm of the song/artist.  In my case, The Red Strokes by Garth Brooks was playing (don’t hate).  Within the little pop-up window attached to iTunes, I had full and instant access to Garth Brooks tagged YouTube videos, Artist Biography, Concert Notifications, Album Recommendations, Song Recommendations, Google News, Merch, Ebay, and more.  A pretty cool set of features that will definitely help me waste valuable time while at the office.

Find Your Missing Cover Art

Sounds simple enough, and it is.  TuneUp simply scans your library for missing cover art and then gives you up to 4 options to select the picture art from.  I didn’t play around with this feature too much, as I needed more help than this.

Clean Your Mislabeled Music

Here’s the good stuff.  Simply drag your library to the pop-up box attached to iTunes (says it can do them all, but that it works best when doing only up to 500 at a time, so I abided).  TuneUp then scans your songs and assigns them to 3 categories: Matches, Likely Matches, & Not Found.  Matches are said to be definite finds, Likely are said to be “pretty good results, but you might want to verify” and Not Found, well, yeah.

For this review, I decided to take my entire library and scan it.  I have 900+ songs on my work laptop, and had 16 tracks Not Found.  These tracks were either self-recorded Garage Band tracks, or live concert tracks.  None that I felt should have been “Found”.  I had several return under Matches, but a majority of them came back as Likely.  I, of course, didn’t feel like verifying any of the Likely ones, so I took all suggestions and decided to see how it faired out.

To scan my roughly 900 songs and save/accept changes, it took about 20-25 minutes.  What impressed me the most was that not only did it fix song names, band names and album titles, but it also added album artwork as well as meta information.  It changed my Sugarcult songs from Rock to Punk Pop, my Rick Astley from Other to Adult Contemporary (touché).  This program is awesome.  As of yet, I haven’t found an incorrect switch.  I’m sure it’s out there and I plan to search for one, but as of now, it certainly beats me actually doing any work to fix anything.  And the best part is, all but 16 songs in my library have cover art, so I can flip through those albums to my hearts content.

This program is Flippin’ Sweet.  Pun Intended. You can pickup the yearly license for $19.95 or splurge and get the lifetime license for $29.95 over at the TuneUp website.

Disclosure: We were provided a free review copy of this software, and we do get a small affiliate percentage of every sale we make of this software–but we wouldn’t endorse it if we didn’t like it, and thoroughly test it out.

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About the Author

Craig, also known as Mr. 51% is part owner of Assault and currently resides somewhere between Dallas and Indiana.
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