[Reviews] TuneUp Media Gold

[Reviews] TuneUp Media Gold: "

Overview

TuneUp is a plugin for iTunes and Windows Media Player that cleans up your messy music collection automatically and is available for PC and Macs. It will quickly fix cover art, metadata, and more. It also has other cool features like displaying Artist info and news, Concert Dates based on your choice of music, and sharing your music preferences with friends. Rather than spending several agonizing hours manually cleaning it up yourself, TuneUp makes it easy.

They offer three different plans including:

• Lite Version – Free


• Annual Version – $19.95


• Gold Version – $29.95

You might want to start out with the Lite free version so you can try before you buy and make sure you like it. The free version is limited to 100 song cleanups and 50 cover art saves. The free version also offers unlimited Concert Alerts and access to Tuniverse, which lets you share and discover new music with friends through social networking.

Installation

Installing TuneUp is quick and easy following the wizard and accepting the defaults. Make sure both Windows Media Player and iTunes is closed before you start the installation process. It will need to install and configure the MS Visual C++ Redistributable during installation.

TuneUp in iTunes

If you’ve been using iTunes over the years, you probably have missing metadata and cover art in your Library.

After installation open iTunes and you’ll see a new sidebar on the right side of iTunes. You’ll need to create an account first, and then enter your activation code if you have one.

Here is a closer look at the TuneUp sidebar.

After creating your account and logging in, the first step to take is to launch the clean feature.

Then click on the Analyze icon to begin analysis of your collection…the amount of time it takes will depend on the size of your collection, but in our tests we had around 1,400 tracks and it only took a couple of minutes.

Click the Analyze button and it will start analyzing your music collection for errors.

After the analysis is complete you’ll be shown an overview of the results. As you can see our collection is not in very good shape, only 16% clean.

Click the Return to Clean button and drag the tracks over to TuneUp and it will compare them against the Gracenote Database and find the correct Album Art, Genres, Titles, and more.

Again, the amount of time it takes to compare your tracks and clean them up will depend on the size of the collection. They recommend you drag 500 tracks over for best results. By default while it’s cleaning up your music, it’ll show tips while it’s processing and you can turn it off if you want.

Here is how it will look with the tips off.

Here we see it’s finding the correct album art, tracks, artists and more.

Luckily, you don’t have to keep TuneUp showing all the time. You have the ability to minimize the sidebar, or close it all together and launch it only when you want to use it.

If you have a large collection that is really messed up, you actually might want to let it run during the day while at work or over night while it retrieves the correct data for all of your tracks. When it’s complete…you can see our collection looks a lot better and we have cover art and metadata for our tracks.

We didn’t clean our entire collection but did most of it. When you run the Analyze option again, you’ll see our collection is a lot more healthy.

Additional Features

There are other cool features you get with TuneUp like the ability to share recently played songs on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

It will find Concerts in your area based on your music collection and lets you buy tickets for shows, which is another cool benefit.

Also included is a Tuniverse tab that will show Videos, Bios, Similar Artists, News, and other online stores where you can purchase music from.

Go through the options and tweak TuneUp to work the way you like. One option to take note of is under the Main Preferences under Dock TuneUp with and select which media player you’re using.

TuneUp with Windows Media Player

While it’s does a great job with iTunes, there are many users of Windows Media Player out there who’d like to clean up their messy music libraries. You can access it by opening Library View and hitting Alt+T to bring up the Tools Menu and you’ll find it under Plug-ins.

It works essentially the same with WMP as is does with iTunes.

Conclusion

Overall our experience with TuneUp was positive. There are a lot of cool features and it will save a lot of time so you don’t have to clean up a messy iTunes or WMP collection manually. One caveat is if you have a very large and messy collection, it will take a while for it to compare your tracks against the Gracenote Database and find the appropriate Cover Art and Metadata. Also, it only supports WMA, MP4, and MP3 music file formats, so if you’re using WMP to play FLAC or OGG files, it won’t recognize them.

It will work with iTunes 9 and we tested it on iTunes 10 for this review and it worked very well. After trying the free version you’ll definitely want to update to one of the Premium versions.

If you’re looking for an easy way to clean up your iTunes music library automatically, TuneUp is definitely worth checking out. They do offer a free limited trial, and if you like it you can purchase an Annual or Gold membership.

For more watch the TuneUp Demo Video:

TuneUp Demo

Works on Intel Macs running OS X, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 32 & 64-bit versions.

Download Tuneup