After an exhilarating day where we had more than 2700 entries and 800 comments for EASEUS Partition Master Pro giveaway, Day 13 of TechPP Mega Christmas Giveaway will present to you an opportunity to win a free license of TuneUp Gold, a must have utility if you are a music lover.
TuneUp is a companion app to iTunes which is able to scan the first few seconds of a track, compare it to the Gracenote catalog in order to identify it, then fills in your missing data automatically and it grabs album art as well. For serious music fans (that use iTunes), it could be a must-have application. TuneUp provides the functionality (for a fee) what I believe should have been there by default in iTunes.
TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box, and the software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint.
The interface is simple and intuitive. Upon launching iTunes, a sidebar appears with four tabs labeled “Clean”, “Cover Art”, “Tuniverse”, and “Concerts”. TuneUp’s biggest draw are the Clean and Cover Art tabs, which utilize the Gracenote database. To use each, the user simply selects a batch of songs and drags them to the appropriate field. Each song is quickly analyzed, and the program presents a number of possible matches for the user to either apply or discard. The program will attempt to identify the song in question after which it will group it as positively, probably, or not identified.
Trust me, this app is super-fast. I was amazed to see how easily and quickly it was able to identify and fetch the details & cover art of so many songs in my iTunes library. Check out the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ snapshots of my iTunes library to know what exactly it can do and how organized your iTunes library would look.
In practice the cleaning functionality works well. Even after stripping all ID3 data embedded in MP3s from a portion of my music library, TuneUp was able to correctly identify songs at least 95% of the time. In addition to cleanup, as a way to offer long-term value, TuneUp has included a number of recommendation features. ‘Tuniverse’ presents you with the best music content from the web contextualized around what’s playing in iTunes. ‘Concerts’ presents a basic calendar that lists any upcoming events in a region.
A word of caution though, the utility doesn’t always work perfectly. It won’t always find meta data, and it may not be able to find album art for everything. Sometimes it will find correct meta data and the right album art, but when you select that album art icon, the larger preview has an error and does not display the right picture. This happens for just 10% of the songs in your library on an average, so just be sure to check out the recommendations properly and do not rely on TuneUp completely to fix your iTunes library. With these minor issues, I would still rate this utility as ‘Very Good’. It delivers what it promises to do at the end of the day.
I’d recommend TuneUp for anyone with a library in need of help. Whether you need album art or correct meta data, TuneUp can help. The iPhone and iPod Touch both display album art while playing music, so it’s useful to have it be correct.
There is a free version of TuneUp available to test out. It’s limited to 100 song fixes and 50 album art fixes, which may not actually be enough to fix the problems in your library. TuneUp will costs users $20 a year or $30 for a lifetime purchase. For the readers of TechPP, i.e YOU, TuneUpMedia are providing a 15% flat discount on your purchase of yearly or lifetime licenses. When you are registering, make sure you use the Promo code “TECHPP” to avail the discount (offer expires 1/10/10).
TuneUp Gold – Free Licenses Giveaway
We have 10 Free licenses of TuneUp Gold Yearly plan to be given away. As always, you are required to leave a comment below mentioning why you would like to win a free license. 10 lucky winners will be chosen randomly and will be mailed about the license details. Make sure you enter a valid eMail address when you are leaving your comments in the form below.
Ghacks is giving away 1000 free licenses of DVDFast converter Pro. Make sure you check them out.
Raju PP is the founder-editor of Technically Personal. He holds an Engineering degree in Electronics & Communication, and has previously worked as a Technical Specialist in Banking Software domain.
