Tune up iTunes : mini review

A few days ago a Mac version of Tune up for iTunes was released.
There is a free trial which allows you to clean up 500 song tags, so I figured I would give it a go. I have a heap of missing tags from my itunes library, so many it would literally take about a month of solid work to fix them all. I have in the past tried a number of the other programs out there (for mac) but none worked.
So with very low expectations I downloaded tuneup.

Good:
It works very well, grabs art work and fills in all the correct tag info with very high accuracy.
It was so good that have just upgraded to the 1-year subscription ~10 euro.
So far I have done about 1/5 of the tracks needing to be fixed (1500) and its taken ~3h to process that, but only about 15 min of my time to click a button here and there while it works in the background.

Bad:
Its not the fastest program you'll ever use.
It has crashed a few times
Uses up a fair amount of the cpu ~80% when filling in track info. When idle it drops back to just a few %.

So in summary,
its a good program... but only if you have a lot of missing tags.
The price is abit steep, espically if you keep paying a yearly fee. There is a life time membership for 20 USD.
I am now pretty good with making sure any new albums added to my iTunes are correctly tagged, thus I think once I finish cleaning my library I probably won't need this app anymore. But its still been worth the cost.
a

 

My iTunes library could use a tuneup. It's not too bad since I fixed quite a few tags over the years, but there are still "gaps", mostly missing covers.

 

Well tuneup will get the album art for you, but if that's all you need then there are free alternatives... eg itunes store account, amazon album art widget etc.
Although you could use it for the free 50 album art searches.
a

 

I downloaded the demo. Out of the 46 tracks I have it, It only came up with suggestions for two, and the suggestions were wrong.

 

Thats strange, I've been hitting over 90% correct and have done about 3000 tracks now. The program is basically just a front end for the gracenote database.. the largest music database there is, so if its not finding your stuff, you must like some very very unique tracks.
But like I said in my review, its a good program if you have alot of missing tag info, probably not worth your time for only 46 tracks.
a

 

Hey guys! I actually work for TuneUp and thought I could help. To address the bad matches issue that chris27 was talking about , TuneUp uses both an "audiofinger print" and the original metadata to find matches. If the quality of the recording isn't clear or the audio itself is "questionable" and the original metadata has been altered you're more prone to getting mismatches matches. If you can Chris , let me know what records/albums came up missing so I can see if we can help.

I'll be around the boards so you guys are more than welcome to message me if you guys need help. We really want to try to stay in contact with our customers and listen to their needs and feedback so we can really make this thing as cool as we believe it is.

 

Hi tuneupba,
and welcome to the forum !
I'm sure you probably already know these issues, but anyways heres some issues I've had:
1) stability has been a problem with the current release... often requiring a force quit.
2) speed, can be painfully slow and sometimes locks up
3) cpu usage could be lower when in use as it currently max's out the fans and I'm hitting about +80% usage, so if this could be reduce, it would make it much easier to update tracks in the background and still use the laptop for other things.
Thanks again
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Thanks for the warm welcome.

All three of these issues are currently being worked on by our Engineering Team. We just released version 1.02 which resolves a few of them - you might what to upgrade your current version of TuneUp if you're still on 1.0 (right click anywhere in the application and select "check for update").

Thanks again for the feedback - this sort of stuff is really important to us as we continue to improve TuneUp.