Your Music Collection Is A Mess!

“Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul” Plato


I had this old compilation CD with Southern Rock on it. Don't even remember where it came from. I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it, because there were only a few songs on it that I either liked or didn't have on another CD. Plus, it was in terrible shape, all scratched up. My CD's are all pretty much scratch free, thank you very much. Anyway, I decided I wanted to take a couple of songs off it to add to iTunes. One was Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Yeah, I used to have "Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd", but that was on vinyl and those 33 1/3 discs don't fit the new players, so well. The other song was “One Way Out” by the Allman Brothers. So off I go, into iTunes, to add these two classics into my tuneage. Image my shock, chagrin, even, when the songs showed up in iTunes, not as the songs they were supposed to be, by who they were supposed to be by, rather they were listed as “Street Corner Serenade” by Wet Willie and “Don't Misunderstand Me” by the Rossington Collins Band! Whhaaat? I tried to change it, manually, in iTunes, but, apparently it can't be done. So I set out to see if it could be “fixed”. In my quest I stumbled upon something really great. It's called TuneUp, and if you haven't heard of it, listen up: You may like it! If you do, you can register here, via comment, to win a license! More about that later. First, let's talk TuneUp!


TuneUp says our music collections are a mess, and they'll fix them,automagically! And, surprise! They do! What TuneUp is, essentially, is a cleanup application for iTunes, to fix all the “broken” things, like missing cover art and music labeled “unknown” and such. It does all that and so much more! TuneUp docks on the side of iTunes, making it handy to drag and drop files for cleaning, looking up band bios, or seeing which bands in your library are playing in your area. While at first it was hard for me to get used to having it docked there, I actually like it, now! I also thought, at first, all I'd use it for was to clean some mislabeled songs and replace some cover art, but was I ever wrong! Here's a run down of the features in TuneUp:

Clean - Fix the ID3 tags on your MP3's: With the “Clean” feature, you drag up to 500 songs at a time – those labeled “unknown” or the dreaded “track 01” irritations, even when the artist is labeled different ways on different tracks (The Rolling Stones vs. Rolling Stone, The). TuneUp fills in the missing metadata like artist, song name, album, release year and genre. What TuneUp does is take an “acoustic fingerprint” of the song and references it against a database of over 100 million indexed tracks. It actually “listens” to the music to identify it! You can do some field specific cleaning, which means you can set the metadata is saved by default. For instance, if you have a mixtape and you want to save the artist/track name, but you also want to keep the original mixtape Album label. In other words, you have more control over your environment! One thing I love is that you can disable Greatest Hits compilations to match songs to their original albums! Mac users can also choose if they'd like TuneUp to create playlists of dirty/cleaned songs.

Cover Art - Find and fill in missing album cover art: Those irritating gray music notes in your cover flow? When there's no cover art to be found by iTunes? TuneUp can bust a move all over that! I had nearly 300 tunes missing cover art and TuneUp found all but six. That is amazing! No drag & drop on this feature, simply choose “CoverArt” and it automatically checks your music library for missing cover art!

Tuniverse - Get the most out of the music you love: Artist bios from Wikipedia, YouTube videos, artist related auctions on ebay, all without ever leaving the iTunes interface! But that's not all! There's also album recommendations and song recommendations, as well as Google news based on what you listen to! Without TuneUp, I'd never have known the Toad the Wet Sprocket has extended their tour! Admittedly, that's mostly because I don't care, but I do love that band's name!

Concerts - Never (ever) miss another show: Not only can you find out, at a glance, if one of the bands in your music library is playing in your area, you get links to buy tickets to the show right there in your iTunes interface! No lie!

That's what TuneUp has! Now, this is what I'd like it to have! One thing I think would be really cool for TuneUp to add, one day, would be a lyrics tab. I'm a lyrics freak and, frankly, I'd love to be able to go directly to the lyrics for any song I happen to be listening to at the time, without going to Google, typing in the name, choosing a site, finding out it's one of those that people submit whatever “lyrics” they think are being sung!

I'm a little underwhelmed by the YouTube video section. Being one of the MTV watching pioneers, with fond memories of many of the great/stupid/weird/goofy videos of the 80's and 90's, I'd like those videos to be in the list when I play one of the old songs. Instead, I mostly get live versions of the songs. That would be a nice option, but not the only option, if you know what I mean.

I have to say that the original reason I found TuneUp, those two mislabeled songs/bands, well, that never got fixed. Ironically, those two songs were the only ones in my whole library that didn't get fixed! To be totally fair, TuneUp took all the information and is working on finding out why it didn't work and fixing it since it is, as they say, the thing that TuneUp is really meant to do!

All in all, I love TuneUp and the way it cleaned up my iTunes music library! If you have iTunes, an iPod or an iPhone, you really should check it out! At $19.95 for a yearly subscription, it's a good deal, but the really great deal is the one-time (forever!) license at $29.95! You can get your TuneUp at the TuneUp Store and TuneUp is now also available at Apple stores, worldwide!

Now, for the fun part! TuneUp is letting me give a license to one of you! In order to enter, you must follow these simple rules:

1.Comment on THIS THREAD in THIS BLOG. Only one comment per entrant! Repeats will not be counted!

2.In the comment, you must give me two pieces of information. First, I want to know how many tunes you have in your iTunes music library (mine's totally small, I only have 1939 tunes!). The other thing I want to know is what is the feature you think you'd use the most in TuneUp? If you want, for fun, you can also tell what you'd like to see in a future release of TuneUp!

That's it! Again, too easy! The contest only goes through Midnight Sunday, June 14, so enter now! I'll pick the winning comment with Random.org and announce the winner in a special post Monday morning. Since I don't want you to have to post your email for all the world to see, please check back then and see if you're the lucky winner!