TuneUp your iTunes music library
May 20th, 2009 by Jason Parker
(Credit: CBSi)
If you are an iTunes fan with a large library of music, chances are you have several songs with missing tags and cover art. Most people get their music from a number of sources, making it inevitable that some of your music doesn't have the right tags. While you could go in and fill in the genre, album name and artist fields by hand, a huge library would take a long time to get through — not to mention all the time it would take searching for all the missing album artwork.
TuneUp Companion (Windows or Mac) is a plug-in for iTunes that does all the tedious tagging and cover art retrieval work for you. In addition to cleaning up your library, TuneUp offers the "Tuniverse", which locates videos, concert tickets and news on the web about selected bands. You also can find out when the artist of the currently playing track has a concert coming up in your area. We wrote about an early version of the software in June of last year, and while it did a fairly good job of cleaning up tags and cover art, we didn't think it was quite ready for prime time.
TuneUp Companion shows up on the right alongside iTunes so it's easy to drag and drop tracks for cleaning. (Credit: CBSi)
Well, the folks at TuneUp Media announced they have streamlined TuneUp Companion and added a new look and extra features to sweeten the deal. Along with the cleaner interface, users will now be able to choose which metadata to save through TuneUp Companion's newly added field-specific cleaning. Other tweaks include the ability to disable greatest hits compilations in search results and Mac users will now be able to choose whether they'd like TuneUp to create playlists of all the albums they've cleaned.
The Tuniverse tab gives you a nice overview of currently playing music
along with online videos, news and more. (Credit: CBSi)
The downloadable trial will let you sample some of the program's features including 100 free track clean-ups and 50 cover art matches, along with the Tuniverse information and upcoming concerts. The pricing for the full version of the program is a bit strange. You get unlimited use of the product for US$19.95 a year, or you can pay US$29.95 for a lifetime membership. Sounds like any sane person would pay US$29.95, but that's probably what they're banking on. Either way, if you have a big or growing music library, TuneUp Companion is a great way to get all your music properly labelled. The additional easily accessible online news and videos as well as concert information are icing on the cake.
I bought to av cable and my ipod classic plays movies on my tv but not my iPod touch! the videos play for like one second and then backs out to the videos menu. Do i really have to buy the cable directly from Apple? How am I having problems with the newer ipod rather than this old 5th generation ipod! Suggestions anyone? 
Firtina Ozbalikci
December 5th, 2009 at 3:31am
... Windows media player and winamp have this feature for free.
drew
January 12th, 2010 at 6:28pm
i want it
Mickey Havard
July 20th, 2010 at 8:15am
I've seen this program for i-tunes a while back and decided to try it out. It worked great for the song cleaning, information to youtube on music videos or concerts close by and purchasable merch on ebay was a nice touch. One problem to concern with though, later on the months as you update i-tunes, tune-up might not work...why? The program just doesn't read correctly for i-tunes and they continuously have to update their software to make it compatible, and they're not keeping up with the pace apple does. Any problems can be resolved on their website, whether it be firewall is now blocking it or you need to go and re-upload a newer version after deleting your current version, but seeing as this product was purchased to be an easy clean up on i-tunes to this, is all this trouble really worth it? Excellent program to add on to i-tunes...if, you can get it to work.