tuxgeek

The odds are not every song in your library has all the correct ID3 tags – things such as Artist name, Album, Track, Year – and the gorgeous album art, which is definitely a must have with the latest versions of players.

This is where TuneUp Companion comes to the rescue : a small plugin for iTunes that manages to fix your ID3 tags and add album art.

Usability

To fix an album, you just have to select ‘Clean your mislabeled music’ and drag-n-drop the song or the album into the blue box. It usually takes about 5-15 seconds per song for the algorithm to recognize the song and present you with what it thinks is the right information. You then have a choice to save the correct information to your songs.

Depending on the ID3 tag version and how much of the information is wrong it usually takes less than 30 seconds for an entire album to be saved.

Adding album art is equally easy – you’re even presented with a choice between different versions of the cover.

There are some extra features:

• Integration with YouTube, for watching music videos and content related to the artist.
• Concert notifications from StubHub
• Album recommendations using Amazon
• eBay integration for tickets, CD’s, etc.
• Analyze feature tells you how many songs have correct tags.

Cons

This application only works with iTunes – no luck for Linux users or Windows Media Player fans.

It uses a product activation scheme – same as WGA or Photoshop for example – that creates an unique fingerprint for your computer. Once activated you’re limited to 1 license transfer to another computer.

As of writing this article users are reporting some issues with iTunes 8, which are solved by reinstalling the app. Mac version is ‘coming this fall’, and signups for the beta are open.

Conclusion

TuneUp Companion is very accurate – better than FixTunes and MusicBrainz in my tests – because it uses one of the largest, most comprehensive music databases, Gracenote.

The free version of TuneUp is limited to cleaning  500 songs and 50 album covers.  For unlimited cleans and album covers a single computer license is 11.95$/year or 19.95$ lifetime.

Download it from here.