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First Look: TuneUp for Mac now ready to tackle your iTunes disorganization

by Michael Rose Dec 11th 2008 at 1:30PM

Despite the presence of a checkbox to "keep iTunes library organized" in the application's preferences, the fact remains that iTunes tracks -- coming from a plethora of sources and of varying vintage, and sometimes numbering in the thousands -- are a black hole of bad metadata. Track and performer names may be wrong or missing (the dreaded "Track 01" and my favorite band, Unknown Artist, are frequently seen); other details may be off-base, and as for album art... well, let's just say that I don't use Cover Flow that much, and not because I don't like the way it looks; it's just that the wide stretches of empty covers are depressing.

There's some help on the way from TuneUp; the formerly Windows-only iTunes companion is now available for the Mac, with a free version that 'cleans' up to 500 tracks and a paid/subscription Premium license ($19.95 onetime or $11.95/annual) with unlimited scrubbing bubble power.

I decided to give TuneUp a trial run on the most confused, mixed-up section of my iTunes library: a collection of professional and collegiate a cappella tracks, with track names identical to the original recordings, sure to befuddle any conventional artist matching strategy. Would TuneUp's leverage of the Gracenote database give it an advantage in dealing with these puzzlers? Read on for more, or check out our gallery of TuneUp screenshots.

TuneUp for Mac

The first thing I noticed about the TuneUp plugin for iTunes is that it isn't. Isn't a plugin for iTunes, that is -- it's a separate application that 'side-hugs' the iTunes window, and tries to track with it as you resize, hide the Genius sidebar, etc. Most of the time it's not much of an issue, but you do notice the lag and redraw oddities when moving the iTunes window around, and it's a reminder that the integration between the two apps is less tight than it would be with a true plugin approach. There are other rough edges in the TuneUp 1.0 version, mostly annoying rather than serious; the one that kept me gritting my teeth was a persistent marble of doom that hung around long after the tool was done processing. You could click through it and keep working but it definitely was harshing my buzz.

TuneUp's concert search, video pane and cover art download features are nicely done (I especially liked the YouTube inset for selected songs), but the core of the app is the Cleaning. I dragged a cluster of 80 songs onto the Clean pane and let the tool start cranking away (it took several minutes for all the results to come in, which is normal). TuneUp broke the results into "Exact Match" and "Likely Match" sections, presumably based on the strength of the Gracenote fingerprint, and I was pretty impressed; it showed corresponding albums and the matching tracks from a bushelful of well- and lesser-known singing groups from colleges around the country. Once the matches came in, I clicked Save for individual tracks (or Save All for the batch) and the iTunes metadata began to update on the fly. Cover art was also available for most of the tracks; clicking the thumbnail gave me the choice of which images to associate with the tracks.

Out of the 80-odd tracks I chose, more than 10 couldn't be identified at all; your mileage may vary, but a cursory check showed that most of these were live or other bootleg recordings that were unlikely to be in Gracenote's files anyway. For the most part, the identified tracks were right on the money with artist information. The one clear error was in associating one version of "Stay (Wasting Time)" with the authentic Dave Matthews Band rather than the a capella group that had recorded it.

More problematic (at least for my iTunes usage profile) was that TuneUp was quite thorough in replacing the track metadata with its discovered, correct information. This thoroughness extended to the Genre field, which meant that many of these tracks -- unclassifiable by Gracenote's standards -- ended up as "Data & Other" songs, while others got obscure genres I'd never thought existed. Since I was using the genre of 'A Cappella' as a tag for all these songs, I had to go back into iTunes, sort my tracks by modification date, and change them all back to the correct setting. You might not have this particular issue, but for me it wasn't that pleasant to have to 'undo' the work of TuneUp. A preference setting to allow selective blocking of metadata changes from key fields would probably clear this up.

Overall, if you have a messy iTunes library and you crave some organizational assistance, you probably should try out TuneUp's free version on a few tracks and see how it works for you. I'm not necessarily sold on the full version myself yet, but some work on the cosmetic and performance issues combined with more options on metadata replacement might turn me around.



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David

I've been using Jaikoz to clean up my tags for over a year. http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
I got tired of iEatBrainz since it was no longer being developed and openly stated on it's website that it's functionality would eventually cease. Jaikoz uses the Musicbrainz database. There's a bit of a learning curve, and I think it's written in java, but it works better than anything I've tried even if it's not the prettiest thing out there.

If anyone would recommend something over Jaikoz, I'm all ears. Jaikoz is a HUGE help, but I still have to tweak quite a bit and musicbrainz' album art files are tiny so I need to use one of Doug's excellent scripts to find some nice fat album art.

January 04 2009 at 3:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
AndyMcConnell

I forgot to mention... iTunes will hang on launch, until you reboot. :)
Not very Mac-like, IMHO. Sounds like its sharing some libraries that need unloading/reloading after simply deleting the files. I wish I were savvy enough with which kernel modules / kexts to reload instead of rebooting.... (*sigh*).

December 20 2008 at 3:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dazex

I just wanted to share my experience with Tuneup so far. I tried Fixtune, and it works pretty well. However, Tuneup works better for me. I like the ability to selectively drag and drop songs to be "fixed." And Tuneup is able to fix all my international music. (Japanese, Korean, Chinese) This alone is amazing as I haven't been able to find this feature anywhere else. Most of my international songs don't have any embedded metadata, yet Tuneup was able to correct ID the song and label it with the correct album artwork and oriental character names. I wasn't able to get Fixtune to work on the international music. So big thumbs up for Tuneup there.

December 15 2008 at 2:00 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to dazex's comment
AndyMcConnell

I tried this product last week, 1.0, and it simply did not find any items to clean. So, I quit the app. And I deleted the Application/TuneUp.app, which is the "right" way to uninstall in Mac OS.

I tried the "uninstaller" in version 1.02 tonight. It simply does not work. iTunes fails to launch after running the uninstaller if you select anything other than the /Users/username/Preferences/TuneUpMediaPreferences (which is the ONLY file selected by default!) When I use the uninstaller to remove anything else, iTunes will hang on launch with this error message in the console:

com.apple.launchd[176] ([0x0-0x210210].com.apple.iTunes[28124]): Exited: Terminated

Not good. Even if the preferences are gone, the code still lingers.

Please redouble your efforts to clean up your Mac port.

December 20 2008 at 2:36 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
max

i installed this, glanced at plenty of incorrect cover art, then saw it booting into my dock upon startup, i don't really like that, especially when its not in the startup list in accounts... so looked for uninstall both in the program and in the installer and to no avail... don't really like that either. seems kinda sneaky ala realplayer windows memories...

thanks to this post i found out how to uninstall

thanks but no thanks :(

mg

December 12 2008 at 1:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
thyx

Hi all, hi Kirk & Tom,

you saved my day… (or at least some minutes of panic)

I tried out Tuneup yesterday evening. Everything worked interestingly…
After some time – this morning, Berlin – I realized that I couldn't use my user login anymore, it just vanished without any chance to enter anything. I decided to reboot. Only then I realized that my login system was f…d up. I can't prove it.
Luckily I've read your posts and had two backups at hand.

I removed most of the usr/local/… and /Library/ Frameworks stuff by hand and everything's fine now, again.

Btw, the deinstaller's option to deinstall the sparkle framework reminds of good old Win 95 days when I had the pleasure to uninstall crucial dlls with the help of deinstallers…

I can't prove it 100% – and won't waste more time to make the issue repeatable or contact support – but, yes, the
Good to know that AppZapper and probably Hazel etc. aren't able to manage that, too.

thyx

PS In case anyone else needs the full list of installed files I post it according to the log file. Luckily deleting the ones I could read on Kirk's screenshot was good enough.

TuneUp 1.0
"TuneUp.app" at "/Applications" was installed.
"TuneUp Visualizer.bundle" at "/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins" was installed.
"TuneUpMedia" at "/Library" was installed.
"TuneUpMediaPreferences" at "/Users/th/Library/Preferences" was installed.
"expat.framework" at "/Library/Frameworks" was installed.
"SharedMenusCocoa.framework" at "/Library/Frameworks" was installed.
"TuneUpDater.framework" at "/Library/Frameworks" was installed.
"Sparkle.framework" at "/Library/Frameworks" was installed.
"CHBrowserView.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcrecpp.a" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libgnsdk_musicid_file.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libgnsdk_sdkmanager.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libmusicid_osx.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libjson.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcre.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libjson.0.0.1.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcreposix.0.0.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libjson.la" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcre.a" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcre.0.0.1.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libjson.a" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcreposix.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcrecpp.lai" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcrecpp.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libjson.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcrecpp.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"libpcrecpp.0.0.0.dylib" at "/usr/local/lib" was installed.
"TuneUp Uninstaller.app" at "/Users/th/Library/Logs" was installed.
Installation finished on 2008-12-11 19:40:45 +0100

[Posted at Kirkville, too. http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20081211181225290]

December 12 2008 at 9:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Daniel

Wow, spinning beach ball of DOOM! Even on a fast iMac. Maybe I'll wait 'til version 2.

December 11 2008 at 11:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Zombie Flanders

You know, what would really be sweet is if Apple would allow you to sort songs with the small "!" to the left of them. Sure it's nice to know that iTunes can't find that song, but why not let you see all the songs it can't find altogether so you can batch delete them?

December 11 2008 at 7:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
cavsct94

"This code has been used the maximum number of times."

Nice bait and switch on the "free" program, FixTunes.

December 11 2008 at 4:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to cavsct94's comment
Michael Rose

See the revised code above. We're working out another discount for TUAW readers who want to try FixTunes.

December 11 2008 at 5:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cormier6083

Does anyone find that this app is slow. Thought I was gonna get a Kernel panic :P. It's useable, but it's slow. Need a tad bit of work, unfortunately.

December 11 2008 at 4:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
thyx

> Wow that was fast!! The 25 codes were gone in about 20 minutes. I created a new code for users that would like to download FixTunes and it will only cost you $5 instead of $25. Enter the code: TUAW2 for the discounted price.

Or you may consider TECHCRUNCH for fixtunes instead of paying 5$ …

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/11/tuneup-brings-its-itunes-cleanup-wizard-to-the-mac/

I still can't say which design is more awkward

thyx

December 11 2008 at 3:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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