For years now I have despised the way iTunes handles it’s music organisation, and it’s inability to keep compilations together. Leaving you with a huge mess of a library. Then there’s the other bug bear – it not being able to locate album art unless you manually specify it. Years ago (when I was younger and had more time on my hands) I used to go through my collections with ID3 tag editors. I no longer have time for things like that, and with an 90GB iTunes library it would take me the best part of a year.
Luckily I recently stumbled upon an application called TuneUp (thanks to a Google Adwords ad on my own site!) so I headed over to it’s homepage and downloaded a demo copy.. The application boasts the ability to be able to clean up incorrectly tagged tracks and downloaded album artwork, so it seemed perfect! The demo version came with some limitations, the first being it would only clean 100 tracks and source 50 artwork peg’s.
So I searched through my album for the inevitable unknown album by unknown artists, which contain a massive 950 MP3’s. I threw the first 100 at the TuneUp app and sat and watched it query each one.. I was amazed to see it correctly tag every track, so I clicked the save button to update their ID3 tags. Then made my way back to it’s homepage to activate a year’s membership to finish my cleaning up!
I have just set it going on the remaining 800 tracks in the album, and just like the demo version it’s successfully tagging everyone!
The application is faultless – and I would highly recommend it!