TuneUp For Mac Review : Organsise, iDentify and DeDupe Your iTunes Library

TuneUP for mac plugs right into your iTunes library to deal with all that cleaning up and organisation stuff. Track names are filled it along with artist information, you can clean up and de dupe songs along with applying album artworkI’ll admit that I’m more than a touch OCD about keeping my iTunes library organised and making sure every track has the right title, in the correct album along with album artwork. Thankfully most music I have gets recognised by iTunes and does the work but given the chance to grab TuneUp for mac grand total of $10 it had to get the review treatment.

So once you’ve downloaded, installed and then scouted around to enter the licence which they don’t make it easy to do, TuneUp docks with your main iTunes window although you can set it to float.  Just in case you struggle to enter the licence information, it’s not in a drop down menu, just click on the really small help icon at the bottom of the tuneup window.

Getting going couldn’t be simpler as it’s a simple drag and drop from your iTunes Library into the TuneUp window and then letting it get on to do it’s matching thing.

 

whilst on the subject of preferences and menus they really are quite sparse. I did encounter an interesting bug when trying to update my location. Clicking on save popped up that city is required despite not letting me enter anything into any of the dialogue boxes.

Cleaning your iTunes music library.

The most “bought for” feature of Tune up is the ability to tidy up your iTunes tracks, filling in all those missing fields you’ll see whenever you command click and hit Get Info.And of course you could go in and manually add all the album artwork and other artist information but would you really want to do that as it’s a hell of a lot of work and is really time-consuming.

Cleaning and organising your iTunes library

Tune Up and can perform some nice little tricks to really manage your iTunes library. You might have a straight track that can belong to one or two albums, for example it might be on a greatest hits compilation and also various artists compilation. With Tune Up It’s a simple click to assign it to what ever album you would like.

And of course there’s nothing better than seeing an iTunes music collection resplendent with all it’s cover art. Tune Up will allow you to select from alternative cover art should there be any available, unfortunately if your album or track already has some album art you will need to go in and manually delete the existing artwork.

De Duping
Duplicate files are also nicely dealt with within tune up as it will scan your entire iTunes library and show you any duplicate tracks. This is handy if you want to get rid of the lower bit rates tracks or if your iTunes library has gotten into a bit of a mess if you’ve happened to reimported after moving your library from, let’s say, a network attached storage device.

Tuneiverse

On the last tab Tune Up has a “no playing” feature that lets you view the currently playing track online, send a tweet, suggests similar album recommendations and a really nice little touch is it links in with eBay to find any related merchandise.I found myself getting sucked in all too easily to see what some of my favourite track sounded like when performed live.

So who is the target audience for this program?

To be fair iTunes does a pretty good job of recognising CDs that you have ripped, obviously for your own personal pleasure. Where iTunes does fail is if the music comes from a non-original source (downloads) and that’s where Tune Up steps in just take up the slack.

There is no one killer standout feature which would make you want to go and buy tuneup on its own but it’s more a collection of its parts that make up the sum total.   It’s more like one programme but with multiple utilities bundled together to effectively manage your iTunes library.

 

The Cost

Annual Subscription was $39.95 now only $31.96!
One-Time Purchase was $49.95 now only $39.96!

Whether or not forking out its over $30 is going to be of value to you will rely on just how much you use iTunes and feel the need to keep everything organised. It certainly more expensive than iTunes match is only used for one year.

 

How To Get Tune UP for $10.00

After using tuneup for a few hours I was glad I didn’t pay the full price but I’m more than happy at paying $8.95 to get not only tuneup but a whole host of other applications.