TuneUp = Amazing!!

Recently i started a project in my free time to transfer my entire music collection to my external hard drive. This possibly would be a quick task for someone like my wife that has about 15 cds to her name. Myself on the other hand i have well over 300+ cds to go through. Granted some of them won’t make the cut, for whatever reason, but still i am looking at the very least 200 cds. 

As time consuming as this is, and has been, it was made all the worse by the fact that iTunes, for the most part, doesn’t like you putting in cd’s and ripping them. Let alone the fact that i have more than a few “Mix” cds that iTunes absolutely HATES! I was at my wits end trying to go to the net, find a pic of the cover art and then copy it to my library only to have iTunes not convert it when it went to my iPod. Then listening to every mix cd and trying to figure out the artist and the name of the song for stuff that i never owned. The whole project was driving me insane. Until…

Randomly i stumbled upon an in page add for a program called TuneUp. The short little animated gif of what it does was enough to hook me and search out the site. I downloaded the trial program and put it to work immediately. After literally maybe two cds, i went back to the site and purchased the “Lifetime” subscription for $30. No questions asked, it was that damn impressive.

So what exactly does it do? Well to paraphrase the site itself, TuneUp takes your dumpy, dirty, unorganized, uncategorized library, and cleans it up, “Automagically.”  Honestly i don’t care if there are little kittens in my computer now that are being worked tirelessly day and night, what ever makes this app work, i hope it never stops. 

As more of an explanation you can watch this video…

Now that should have cleared up exactly how it works. And let me tell you this isn’t some gimmick, i haven’t been paid off to support this app, i am reviewing it because it does EXACTLY what it says it will.

I got Bill (twitter.com/DangerTom) to download and try it out. “TuneUp is the coolest app I’ve seen in a long time.” He goes on to say “I’m super grateful… it’s already corrected several albums I thought wouldn’t have problems!”

Yeah I was skeptical at first. I have seen more than my share of programs that claim to do any number of things only to fail horribly. This was not one of those. Being able to see cover art for my music is so huge. I am a huge music lover, and looking at my iPod and seeing some gray note and a “Track 13 Unknown Artist” killed me every time. Not to mention that while you are working with the app in iTunes it will give you related artists, Youtube videos related to the track or artist, and the kicker, the Concerts. I for one am actually NOT a concert kinda guy. I just don’t like the crowds, it’s just me. ANYway, being able to have TuneUp analyze the library, and then tell you if there is a concert of any of the bands in your area would be a really big deal if i did go to them.

Now you have to realize that the program isn’t perfect. You can’t pop in the cd that your buddy made of his band in the garage and expect it to know who the hell they are, that won’t work. Also it usually gives you several choices of album art (in itself not a bad thing) but if you choose the wrong one or one that you don’t like you have to delete the artwork and try again. Really a minor issue on both accounts. That is really the only gripe that i have with it, and i wouldn’t say that it detracts from the overall product one bit. 

All said and done, if you call yourself a music lover, and you use iTunes to… love your music, then you really NEED to check this app out. I still won’t tell anyone to “run out and buy it” but seeing as there is a free trial of the program, i would highly suggest that you at least try it out. This thing is a must have for me. Also the support staff is very helpful. When i initially downloaded it, i had it on a computer that probably wasn’t going to get much use. So i sent in an email to see if they could switch it to another PC (yes it works on MAC too)  that i would use more often. Before i could even get home and try it out they had already sent me an email reply letting me know they had taken care of it. Great customer service. 

So now that you have read my review, and know a little more about it, I should let everyone know that I was given three extra codes ($30 each) for TuneUp. In the coming week Bill, Brian and myself will come up with some sort of contest, and we will give them away. It is a code for the lifetime subscription, just like we have, so once you “activate” the code it’s free from then on. Let me know if you (the few faithful readers i have) have ideas on how to do the contest, or if you are even interested at all (which you all should be).  

Check in with my Twitter, or Bill’s and the site over the next week or so and we will have the details as they become clear.