TuneUp Review (Album Art Downloader & MP3 Tagging Software)
Upon downloading the Vuze bittorrent client for our 5 Top Open Source Applications feature, I was offered to download and install a free application called TuneUp. Normally, I despise this sort of sly advertising that relies on you unwittingly pressing agree in a hasty attempt to finish installing the initial program. But this time, I looked into it a little more after being impressed by the sound of the program.
TuneUp is a simple, lightweight application, however, if you’re like me and hate seeing your iTunes library a mess with missing artwork and incorrect track names. Then this is perfect. It performs simple functions such as adding the correct artwork and fixing misspelled titles and artists such as Led Zeppelin which is commonly misspelled. It also fixes the most annoying of all. An endless list of ‘Track 1, Track 2…’ after importing tracks from a CD.
It lives as a sidebar in your iTunes window, which can be fairly annoying but you can choose to banish it to your tray if you like and only recall it when needed. In terms of looks it’s nothing special and can be irritating with the ‘in-your-face’ style advertising at the bottom of the window. However, all of this for me is irrelevant. It gets the job done.
So how does it work? Well, it’s certainly very basic; however it allows you to complete jobs that would normally take hours if you have a vast library of music. It searches the internet, finds and downloads the relevant album art for any albums it discovers that either has none, or offers an alternative to those with incorrect covers. And this is just one of the features.
Another feature of this software is the MP3 tagging function, which is just as effective and time efficient as the album art finder, in this case it corrects misspelled song titles and artist/album names. Simply drag and drop an individual track or groups of tracks up to 500 at a time that need correcting, for instance an album that imported as the dreaded ‘track 1 etc.’ and it will scour the World Wide Web to find your solution. In my experience it has been wholly accurate.
Another extremely good feature of the program is what they call ‘Tuniverse’. When you play a song in iTunes it instantly searches YouTube for related music videos for that song and from that artist. This could be covers of the track by other artists or just others from that album. Furthermore, it displays a short biography of the artist with quick links to a longer edition as well as Twitter updates related to the artist.
Lastly, there is a feature simply called ‘Concerts’. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Searches the internet for upcoming concerts/gigs from the artists in your iTunes library and displays information on date, location and ticket price from Ticketmaster or StubHub.
To summarise, TuneUp is a very efficient piece of album art downloader and mp3 tagging software which can save you hours of your time in sorting out your iTunes library which can be a tedious job to say the least. It also displays information that could be of interest regarding your favourite artists and upcoming tour events. So overall, it’s a fantastic application that simply does a good job. 5 Stars for efficiency and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a bit of a tidy up.
Related Pages:
- SongGenie Review (MP3 Tagging Software for Mac OS X)
- CoverScout Review (Album Art Downloader for Mac OS X)
- CD Art Display Review (Minimalist iTunes Interface For Windows)
- CoverSutra Review (Minimalist iTunes Interface For Mac OS X)
- Songbird Review (Free iTunes Alternative Music Player)
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Comments: 3
12:40 pm 19th November, 2009
Interesting, it seems like a common problem that i-tunes does not get the art, or makes a hash out of an album by splitting it etc. Which is all very strange as by now they should have perfected these things!