It is halftime at Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. Today is the twelfth day of the giveaway and we got 12 more to go. We made lots of Ghacks visitors happy by sending them licenses to great commercial software products such as Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, Cyberlink PowerDVD08 or Bitdefender Total Security. TuneUp is a plugin (some call it extension) for the Apple iTunes software that is supplied as a free and a gold version. There are only two differences between those two versions of TuneUp which will be addressed later in the article.
Both versions of TuneUp are available for Microsoft Windows PCs and Apple Macintosh computers with the limitation that it is currently only working on Intel Based Mac’s running 10.5 or greater. Installation is uncomplicated and the TuneUp bar loads automatically the next time iTunes is started on the computer. The last step before the features can be used is the registration process which takes only a few seconds in iTunes.
TuneUp adds four options to iTunes: Cleaning mislabeled music, finding missing cover art, exploring music and concert notifications.
Adding Meta Tags:
The Clean tab makes TuneUp search for missing meta data in its database. This is simply done by dragging and dropping songs into the TuneUp sidebar. The songs will be analyzed automatically. TuneUp will divide hits into matches and likely matches. Matches have a success rate of 99% while likely matches are about 80-90% correct on average.
All missing metadata, including album art, will be added to the song or album. This tab also provides access to a save all button which is available in the matches and likely matches tab. It is for example possible to save all matches directly in one go and evaluate the likely matches before saving them separately.
Album Cover Art Finder:
TuneUp will automatically scan the iTunes library for songs or albums that are missing cover art and display possible hits in its sidebar. Four different possible images are shown for every album that is missing cover art and it is up to the user to pick the one that is fitting best. Impatient users can click on the Save All button to save all cover art automatically. This will automatically select the first match as the new cover art for the music.
This is a very convenient way of adding missing cover album art to a music collection. Users who do not rely solely on iTunes will be delighted to hear that the cover art is integrated into the music directly which makes it available to other applications as well.
Now Playing:
This combines music recommendations with videos taken directly from Youtube and other news about the song or artist. The videos play directly in iTunes and there are also links to buy merchandise, tickets or music.
Concerts:
This tab will inform the user about local concerts of bands that are in the music collection.
Finally the differences between TuneUp and TuneUp Gold. The free version of the iTunes plugin is limited to 50 cover arts and 500 song cleanups. That’s the only difference.
You can win a copy of TuneUp Gold with a comment on this article. Let us know what software you are currently using to play and manage your music.
Related Articles:
TuneUp Utilities 2011 Review And Giveaway [Ghacks Christmas Giveaway]MediaMonkey Gold Review And Giveaway [Ghacks Christmas Giveaway]
Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: MediaMonkey Gold
SyncPod For Windows Review And Giveaway [Ghacks Christmas Giveaway]
Christmas Giveaway: MediaMonkey Gold
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I’m in but waiting for the CrossOver giveaway.
More, more, more. . . need to fill the new hard drive with goodies!
Thanks in advance. . . ;-)
one more try …
me please – nothing used atm
Look’s nice !
I just purchased my wife an ipod and her library is extremely messy. This would be the icing on the cake! I really want to win this one.
I currently use itunes to manage music, podcasts and getting things onto my ipod. But if I’m working on things that require more resources (photoshop, 3D Modelers, etc.) I switch to foobar2k and listen to music with that. Either way I still use iTunes to manage tags and album art so this would be a great piece of software to have!
I would love to win this for my other half but don’t know what software he currently uses.
Roll me in too ^^
Please enter my name into the prize draw
foobar but my mislabeled songs could use some help
J. River does that for me, I should try this one, but I hate iTunes xD
put me in
My iTunes is a complete mess – it would help manage my music
I love my MediaMonkey but automatic cleanup sounds good to me!
This is software that I use regularly use. Sure would be nice to get the TuneUp Gold.
Never heard of it…however looks brill! Could keep things very nicely organised!! :)
Hello I would love this for me so i could make a review in my site :) I use Itunes to manage and play my music for almost 2 years before that i used to use Windows Media Player but since i got a mac i love using iTunes
My mp3 libary is a mess and now with that new IPhone I need to clean it up. Sounds like a lot of work which could be automated by using this cool App!
Awesome – this would be perfect.
awesome
I currently use iTunes, and this looks like a fab tool to get my music organised!
I’d love to get my hands on this as I use iTunes all the time.
I need to organize my 40GB of music. (iTunes) I dont have the time to get it in order. This is what I have been looking for!
I actually just downloaded this today to try it out. I’m using itunes, but half the music I have is either mistagged or has no artwork, was looking for someway to do it in batch mode. This looks to fit the bill.
Me please!
I’ve just read about this it looks great!
Tried several similar ones like Fixtunes and Picard but still looking for the perfect solution…Hope this is it! :)
I’m currently using Media Monkey to manage my music collection.
One for me please ! Thnx !
Please help me with my iTunes mess….