In an attempt at better control over my growing music library, which is now all digital, I frequently try applications whose claim is to make that process easier. I recently tried two different applications which have a similar basis, ID3 tag clean up, beaTunes2 and TuneUp. Each has interesting additional features, which I’ve listed below.

beaTunes2

by Tagtraum Industried, Inc.

Price: $31.95

Pros:

• Blog capability with Amazon Associate support
• Create playlists based on bpm or key
• ID3 Tag cleanup

Cons:

• Blog capability not easy to set up (I couldn’t get it to work with our blog)
• ID3 Tag cleanup doesn’t work as well as stated

TuneUp

by TuneUp Media 

Price: Free/ $19.95 (year) /$29.95 (life)

Pros:

• Slick interface
• Integrated into iTunes
• Concerts (information on concerts coming)
• Tuniverse (wiki information, links to purchase, youtube videos, etc.)
• Fills album cover art
• ID3 Tag cleanup

Cons:

• Integrated into iTunes (takes up space)
• No way to easily stop analysis
• CoverArt doesn’t work if music has image already (if you want to change you have to clear the image first)
• ID3 Tag cleanup doesn’t work as well as stated

In Use

I used beaTunes2 first. I ran the inspector and it collected the information on my entire library and analyzed it. There were some suggestions about what it thought were problems with my ID3 Tags. Of them I thought I would work on the misspelled band names as a test run. It suggested all the bands who’s names didn’t match exactly, e.g. Lamb of God and Lamb Of God, etc. It suggested several different possibilities for a fix, of them I chose to change all names to the “Lamb of God” spelling.

I then clicked the commit corrections buttons and watched the progress bar. When it was done I sorted my library (in iTunes) by artist and went to look at the Lamb of God set. All the albums were now by Lamb of God, but for some reason all of the albums had been split into at least two, i.e. Burn the Priest was now two albums, Killadelphia was three, etc. WTF?

I inspected all the data in the “Get Info” window (still in iTunes). The albums were all the same, the artist was the same, it even had added the number of disks, number of songs, etc. But for some reason iTunes was making multiple albums for what should have been one.

I decided I’d run TuneUp and see what it did. I ran a Clean on the Lamb of God albums. It came back with three album “matches” and three for “likely matches.” I checked the information it had pulled for Burn the Priest and saved the Clean. Since TuneUp runs as a tool bar to the side of iTunes I watched as it chugged away, the albums songs started collecting into one single album. Then, with one to go, it stopped. I waited as patiently to give it a little while longer in the case it was still crunching.

It wasn’t. It had changed the artist’s name, back to Lamb Of God, much to my dismay (at least beaTunes2 had asked what it wanted me to do). It had also decided the normally one album, Burn the Priest, was in fact two.

Conclusion

Overall I don’t really like either. I think this kind of application is needed, now that we’re living with such large, all digital, libraries. The problem is neither of these are close enough to being there to use. The tried and true methods are still the best at the moment. The “Get CD Track Names” option in the Advanced menu will get the the information from CDDB when you rip your CD’s. If you purchase your music, it comes with the ID3 tags already set for you (and you are purchasing your music, right? Stealing is bad, uhm-kay.). As for fixing the tags that aren’t as perfect if you’d like, you can do so in the “Get Info” window. It is painstaking, but if you’re worried about things like ID3 tags, you’re anal enough to type it in all yourself (only way to get it absolutely right, right?). As for missing artwork and lyrics and such, there are great free programs, or there’s my personal favorite Album Art Thingy, which grabs all the lyrics and album art as they are played in iTunes. There’s a nominal fee of $15. The best part is it works exactly as it is supposed.

My recommendation is, for now, let the people who like to live at the bleeding edge bleed. I’ll re-evaluate at version 3.0 (beaTunes) and 2.0 (TuneUp).