The Tool That Should Have Come With iTunes

January 29, 2009  |  Awesome Apps

headphonesOften, when I download music, the songs that get downloaded come in the form of something like “01 cool song by a guy.mp3″. Having songs download with their actual artist information embedded is rare- getting things like album title, genre, and cover art is basically unheard of.

Thus begins, for the OCD music lover like yours truly, a long and arduous search for all the little bits of data that I need to know for every song I’ve downloaded.

Given the time I’ve spent doing this over the years, I wish I’d known about TuneUp before.

TuneUp is an iTunes plugin that does so many cool things with your music that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it before.

Once you download and install TuneUp, it loads as sidebar to your iTunes, which is a smart feature- no second application to run, so you don’t have to remember to load it- it just loads until you tell it otherwise, every time you run iTunes.

There are four killer features of TuneUp, each of which I’ve previously tried to find applications for and all of which I’ve liked better in TuneUp.

Info Finder

Drag a song from your iTunes into TuneUp (or up to 500 at a time), and the app looks for all the information you’re missing from that song. It finds the right titles, artists, albums, years, and even track numbers. The application claims to get about 85% to 90% of your songs right- good in and of itself, but I found it to be even better. Of the 100 songs I pulled in to TuneUp, a grand total of two were wrong. TuneUp gives you the option to save or cancel the changes, too, so you’re not stuck with the occasional error it does make.

tuneup

Prettification

One of the most aesthetically pleasing parts of iTunes is the Cover Flow section, where you view your music by their album covers. For me, it was totally useless- I didn’t have most of the album covers, and didn’t have the time to find them all. With one click, TuneUp found most of them for me- all I had to do was select “Cover Art” and then “Save All.”

It even found the cover art for an unknown college a cappella group- I actually checked it against the band’s website, I was so surprised. Again, there were a few errors, but TuneUp found 250-some album covers for me I’d never have gotten otherwise. CoverFlow’s much cooler now.

Dig Deeper

Click on the “Now Playing” tab, and you’ll be presented with a whole bunch of information about the artist and song you’re listening to (which is correct, thanks to TuneUp). YouTube videos, concert dates, band websites, and the like are all available from the sidebar. It’s almost like a Ticketmaster/iTunes mashup (which really needs to happen) where in one click you can buy tickets for the band you’re listening to. TuneUp’s information is useful, and will even pause your music to let you watch a YouTube video in the sidebar.

Shows

I’m something of a concert junkie- just saw Fiction Family the other night (it was great, but I digress). Right from within iTunes, TuneUp gives me a summary of the concerts I might want to know about. It parses your library, looks for bands that are on tour, and tells you who’s coming near you and when. I may never miss a concert again!

The biggest reason TuneUp’s going to have some staying power is that it sits in your iTunes, and is a part of that same workflow. With apps like iLike and Last.fm, you’re constantly switching applications to get the real meat of their usefulness. Though the recommendations in TuneUp aren’t necessarily better than the ones in iTunes, they’re still great, and offer sources other than the iTunes store.

Even if you’re not looking to use it forever, TuneUp is well worth the price tag to clean up all of your music- it’s $12 for a year, or $20 forever. There’s a free option that comes with 500 song cleanings and 50 album cover finds. The rest of the content, recommendations and concerts, is all there in the free option.

For the music junkie who likes to actually find their music, label it right, and be able to listen to exactly what they’re looking for, this is a must-have. I’m already getting used to TuneUp as just another third of my iTunes window.

Photo: wood_tang

Liked the post? Share it with somebody!




  • Jeff
    I have about 15 Bjork albums on my iPhone. I sometimes can't remember which songs are on which albums. I love CoverFlow, but those 15 albums for one artist mean a LOT of finger sliding (because then there are 10 Eurythmics, and 7 Doors albums, etc, etc!).

    One tip I have is to take various artists and assign them a few "fake albums" - which function as "Custom Mix CDs" - using ID3 tags.

    I do it like this (using Bjork as an example):

    1) Make a folder on my computer for each artist. Say, "Bjork" for example. Inside that, I create three folders:

    BJORK (for her music in general)
    BJORK Unplugged (for her music which is acoustic)
    BJORK Covers (for her covers of other artists' songs (and incidentally, any of *her* songs covered by another artist)
    BJORK In Concert (for live concert bootlegs)

    2) Open up TagScanner, and I batch-tag every song in a give folder with one of the four "made up albums" as its album (overwriting the original album data). The albums are called (as you might guess) "Bjork", "Bjork Unplugged", "Bjork Covers" and "Bjork Bootlegs".

    3) Download your favorite four Bjork covers (the prettiest ones!) and assign each of these four albums.

    I do this with all my Bojrk. So now I have just *4* albums in coverflow with a jillion songs in them. Plus it is very easy to listen to "just covers" or "just acoustic" if I want. For the Doors, I only have "Regular Songs", and "In Concert", (I don't collect concert bootlegs or acoustics of them) so there are only 2 albums for *ALL* my Doors stuff.

    I also collect a number of Bollywood songs and Indian traditional songs from a vast array of albums. This used to mean a big freaking pile of albums which were scattered throughout CoverFlow (they started with different letters). So I have two "made up albums": "Indian - Bollywood" and "Indian - Classical", where I previously had over a dozen albums (some with just one or two songs in them) in cover flow. BAM! All Indian music in two neat albums, side-by-side in coverflow!

    If you are willing to break out of the original discography arrangement which the music industry and timing/happenstance have created, you can put your many albums into fewer, more complete "imaginary album" containers that make sense to you. It is kind of like making a bunch of "Favorite Mix CD's" for yourself.

    Some might like this idea, and others might disagree with it [because it interrupts the planned continuity of albums for those who really prefer things in the order decided by the music producer - IE: Dark Side Of The Moon can't be played to match up with The Wizard Of Oz]. If you really need to keep some things as a discrete album because it is so awesome that way (Beatles White), you could keep those "sequencing is important" albums in tact.
  • Brilliant! I love this idea, and I think most people would too, because albums are kind of out of style. There ARE a few albums, as you say, that deserve being played as albums, but I actually think the way you organize makes more logical sense.

    Thanks so much for the detailed post!
  • Owenx
    I tried that Musicbrainz thing all i got was crashes,couldn't find album,etc,POS imho.
  • jc20
    never heard of this app, thanks for sharing what you have taken a peek at.
  • Warbzy
    I don't think HenriettaHughes quite understands that in order to download from iTunes you DO pay for the song.
    Ah, what a simple life she must lead.
  • Great post. I'm a DJ and have been plagued with several of these issues in my itunes (which Serato uses as it's phantom player). I'll be downloading this today.
  • Andrew
    This is perfect!
  • HenriettaHughes
    You know what's cool about buying music? You don't have to use this...
  • davep3355
    Yeah, but then you have to have a Zune.... :)
  • Guest
    The zune software has this automatically.
  • Randy
    Where is the $12/$20 fee? When i try to upgrade its 19.99/29.99. Did they hijack prices?
  • picard
    Musicbrainz picard does the same thing for free, its open source and will handle thousands at once. works with any o.s. or player.
  • I used this for a few months during the beta of the Mac version. It's ability to find elusive album art was pretty amazing. I second the recommendation.
  • It does work on Mac. In fact, the Mac version just came out of beta.
  • arjar
    Just downloaded it and i hope it does all the things it says it does (given it's on this site I'm sure it does) but the first thing I noticed is that I can't even get it to minimize! So it's just annoyingly chilling there staring at me while i try to study.
  • arjar
    does not work well on macs AHHHHHHHHH (nuts)
  • arjar
    tightness... does it work on macs? bc we all know macs are the tightness (see how i bookended that one?)
blog comments powered by Disqus