Clean up your musical act

Sure, you started out with good intentions for iTunes, meticulously editing metadata and building perfect playlists. But gradually things got out of hand. BeaTunes is like a Swiss Army knife for your music library. The software fixes all sorts of problems, from metadata errors to spelling mistakes. It also features a couple of neat tricks that will be useful for DJs, including automatic beat detection, and the ability to identify the key of each of your tracks for more seamless mixing.

The first time you open BeaTunes, the application goes to work inspecting and analyzing your library. Inspection works on track metadata, and is fairly quick. BeaTunes inspected our library of 23,000 tracks in a few minutes. Meanwhile, BeaTunes also begins a deeper, much lengthier process of analyzing your tracks in the background, allowing for advanced features like beats per minute and key detection, as well as organization of songs by mood. According to BeaTunes’ calculations, our analysis will be done in a little over two weeks--no kidding.

Analysis options allow you to add extra metadata, handy for flexible categorization and building smart playlists.

The BeaTunes interface follows iTunes conventions. The left column shows various inspection results like “Missing album artist” or “Title starts with tracknumber” and a number indicating the total affected tracks. Playlists, and the Task Queue also reside here. Clicking an inspection presents a list of affected tracks in the right panel, with options for correcting the error. For example, Miscapitalized Title offered to retitle our favorite AC/DC album to standard title case, rather than Back In Black with a capital I. You can also choose to manually enter a title, or ignore the problem and move on.

Fixing metadata in BeaTunes is a snap. You can edit several tracks at once, and BeaTunes’ multiple-choice options make it easy to see exactly what’s going to happen when you apply a correction. For most people, the Inspection tools will probably be the most useful. Analysis is time consuming, but it mostly happens in the background. In addition to detecting BPM and key, analyzing your tracks will let BeaTunes build playlists based on a few selected songs, like a more customizable version of iTunes Genius. The results can be quite good, and you can tweak rules to create perfect mixes automatically.

The bottom line. BeaTunes can fix your metadata, and can even help you find your new favorite songs buried in your library. The interface isn’t as clean or easy to understand as iTunes, but serious music fans will appreciate the high notes.