So What’s Great About TuneUp?

TuneUp, a utility that works with iTunes, has two key functionalities: cleaning up your music library (by fixing your songs’ metadata), and presenting content relevant to it.

Cleaning Up Your Music Library

The first is pretty straightforward: you drag improperly named songs or music lacking album art onto the TuneUp window, and it gets right to work, determining what the song really is (name, album, artist, genre, year, track number, etc.) while searching for matching album covers. I’m happy to say that, at least for me, TuneUp’s batting average was over 80%.

That’s less than what’s claimed on their website, but you can’t fault the convenience. Unless you relish going through your songs and correcting them one by one. The utility seemed to have the most problems identifying songs from compilation albums, preferring to categorize them as part of their original albums.

TuneUp even provides you some control over the clean-up process, at least with album art. It presents up to 4 options for each item it successfully identifies, leaving you to pick the cover that suits your fancy. The changes aren’t final as well; they’re applied only when you click on Save (for each individual item identified) or Save All (for everything). TuneUp also creates folders on your music library, grouping songs it was able to identify and vice-versa by clean-up session.

Relevant Content

The other feature of TuneUp is less important for the user, but probably for the app’s bottomline. It basically recommends videos (from YouTube), albums and songs, as well as list related upcoming concerts within your area. I’m pretty sure TuneUp makes money off this referral traffic, or at least plans to do so. In any case, these recommendations are helpful, but not a must-have.

Issues

TuneUp requires some time to fetch the correct information and album art for your songs. Cleaning up a group of 500 songs (as recommended by TuneUp) took me a little over 2 hours. This isn’t so bad, since you can do something on the computer while waiting.

But I wish TuneUp’s makers found some way to smoothly integrate their utility into iTunes main window. The attached window setup looks good on paper, but it disrupts iTunes’ maximize-restore window functionality, and looks a bit silly as it literally catches up when you resize the iTunes window or move it around.

By far the biggest issue with TuneUp is its responsiveness. Sometimes it freezes up while fetching song data, but at least it doesn’t freeze iTunes (version 8.0.2.20) along with it (maybe that’s why it was kept technically separate from the music player?). The utility also crashed on me at least twice while I was trying it out.

In a Nutshell

Despite these issues however, TuneUp is a great add-on for iTunes, especially for those who need to clean up their music library. Just be patient with it, and it will do its job well. TuneUp is currently available priced at $20 for a one-year subscription, and $30 for lifetime access. The free version offers limited functionality. Visit tuneupmedia.com for more information

(images are screenshots of TuneUp running on my computer)