If an entire iTunes library was purchased from the iTunes Store, all the tracks came with complete metadata. Those lucky (and wealthy) users can scroll through iTunes without seeing any jarring blank spots in the Artist, Album, and Genre columns, or songs named Track 01 and Track 02. The rest of us? Our multi-gig libraries were patchworked together from ripped CDs, mixes from friends, tracks digitized from analog sources, and, um, “found” audio files that could’ve come from anywhere.
TuneUp analyzes your tracks by decompressing the file and making a digital signature, and then searches online databases for matches, finding any missing metadata: artist, album, song title, year recorded, genre, and so on. TuneUp claims 90 percent accuracy, which our tests proved true—when we threw a pile of unlabeled tracks at it, TuneUp correctly identified 91 percent of them. We didn’t always agree with the genres it chose, like “AOR Classic Rock.” (Who cares if the rock is “album-oriented,” this is iTunes!) Live recordings didn’t throw TuneUp off, through it understandably came up empty when we asked it to ID homemade recordings by our musician friends. You can confirm its findings by listening to the tracks and unchecking a box by any incorrect entries. Once you click Save, TuneUp updates your tracks’ metadata with the correct info, adds the album artwork, and even renames and moves the files if you have Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized checked in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced.
The Cover Art tab gives you options.
Besides Clean, TuneUp has tabs for Cover Art, Tuniverse, and Concerts. Cover Art searches multiple online sources for missing album art. We ran iTunes’s Get Album Artwork command (in the Advanced menu) on our library and still had 160 albums missing artwork. TuneUp found artwork for 144 of those—and all 16 albums that it couldn’t find art for are live recordings that weren’t released commercially. Better yet, the app gives you up to four results for album artwork, and you can zoom in on the thumbnail for a closer look before confirming.
Tuniverse displays extra info about the currently playing song, offering tickets, merchandise, and albums for sale on eBay, links to YouTube videos, album and song recommendations from Amazon, and more. And the Concert tab displays upcoming concerts in your area by the artists in your library, with links to the event listing on JamBase.com, Ticketmaster, and StubHub.
Works well and quickly. Clear controls. Attractive interface. Free trial will clean up to 100 tracks and fetch artwork for up to 50 albums. You can run iTunes with it or without it.
Needs Internet connection to work. Won't work on PowerPC Macs or Macs running Tiger.
