Having resisted the temptation to digitalize my collection for a long time (largely due to my investment in thousands of Cd’s, Tapes, Minidisks and vinyl over several years) I was finally thrust into the 21st century when I bought my first old generation ipod.
At the time Itunes did not do fancy things like finding track names or filling in missing album covers. Still I became obsessed with transferring my entire collection on to the magical device whilst spending hours (if not days) filling in missing information. I could honestly write a thesis on iTunes now.
Over the years my collection has grown rapidly and despite a valliant effort the tidiness regime recently began to unravel. Simply put I now had too many songs to have an accurate overview of the missing information and frankly one of the last things I wanted to do after a long day at work is to dissect my entire collection.
I realised I had turned the block when a friend was looking through my collection and commented “I though you were the kind to keep your iTunes in order“. Fortunately I was asked to test drive a piece of software that appealed to my obsession with keeping Itunes in order and could also, potentially, improve my music listening habits helping me rediscover my collection. Having already read about TuneUp I was eager to give it a spin.
After a pretty quick and painless installation the application launches itself side by side with iTunes acting like an added dashboard. After an initial scan of my library I was given the option to drag individual or groups of tracks for TuneUp to process.
Since the application gave me the option to add a ‘cleaned by tune up‘ note to the track’s metadata I decided to set a smart playlist to look for tracks that didn’t mention this phrase. This way I was able to distinguish between tracks I already actioned and those I still needed to run through the application.
Although the manufacturers recommend running 500 songs at a time I often surpassed that processing thousands of tracks in one sessions and though this was sometimes slightly sluggish I suspect this has more to do with ITunes inner workings.
There are also few omissions and tiny mistakes in the catalogue on offer but overall it has to be said I was impressed with the accuracy of results. Not only did the application spot and fix many of my foreign tracks (Italy,Israel, Brazil, Spain etc.) but it also had information for many smaller acts, obscure remixes and albums yet to be released.
The application is bundled with the extra eye-candy they call Tuniverse, a comprehensive resource for the artist I was playing including recent news, biographies and video content. Much like Last.fm there is also a display for upcoming concerts for artists in you like in your area.
In the future I would like to be given the option to select which album a track belongs to (such as in the case of a Greatest Hits Collection where a track may appear on additional releases) but overall TuneUp does an amazing job in fixing your iTunes metadata and guaranteeing it is accurate and up to date.
As my collection continues to grow I’m not sure what I would do without it now.
TRACKS:
Bob Marley – Iron Lion Zion [5 Alive Fugitive Edit]
