Metadata Fixer – TuneUp or Curator

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Ever since I got my MacBook Pro, I have moved all my music to iTunes. All 50 GB of it. Before the shift , my sorting procedure, as all Windows users, would be organizing my music into appropriate folders. So I had about a few hundred folders called “AC~DC, DMB, A’Smith, Assorted” and so on and so forth. This never bothered me much till, well I switched to a Mac and till I got my iPod Touch. Coverflow looked like a flow of boring grey! Something had to be done…

Enter Curator from Kavasoft. It calls itself the “iTunes artwork manager”. It is a standalone application for Mac OS X and not a plug-in for iTunes. It begins by importing my iTunes artwork and organizing my albums, with a color coded buttons indicating whether the relevant cover artwork is present or not. The application being independent of iTunes has its advantages, since now I can see, sort and find album artwork as compared to the iTunes interfaces’ ease of sorting and listening to music. The application did a pretty respectable job of finding artwork for all my correctly named songs from Amazon and the iTunes store. Way better, since iTunes doesn’t have a heap of stuff I’ve got. Unfortunately, my problem was improperly named song files. And quite a large number of them to boot! Now, instead of a flow of grey boxes, I had a sea of an interesting looking cover of “The future is unknown” by “Unknown Hinson“. This is Curators’ way of dealing with artwork it cannot find… Hmph! Not really what I had in mind.

So moving on in my search for a better application, enter TuneUp from TuneUp Media. Now this a companion application to iTunes and sorts out two very essential issues for me… fixes up album artwork and (yipeee, yahoooo, drumroll please) metadata too! It loads up with iTunes and takes a few seconds to establish connection to the internet. The interface gives you four options; Clean, Cover Art, Now Playing and Concerts. Its the first two that are really the core of the application. The latter two options let you look for YouTube and Google videos and artist information for the songs you are currently playing and concert listings in your area from Ticketmaster. There is also a neat little utility within the ‘Clean’ tab, called ‘Analyze’ (indicated by a pink brain) that goes through your library and basically tells you how messy your library is. Mine stood at about 60%. Hmm… OK, so now getting down to business, I started loading about 50 songs at-a-time into the cleaning area. It did its thing, which is combination of its ID3 tags, file name and a snipped of its audio to find a match on Gracenote. Pretty impressive. It did a fantastic job of sorting my library out. The ones it didn’t find, didn’t surprise me at all… They were some obscure Bollywood songs. It would’ve been a miracle if that had been sorted! So all in all a great application and well worth my US $ 19.95.

TuneUp wins this round hands down… Now if only it could sort my life out at the moment!