Some people, myself included, are a little OCD about their album art and ID3 tage information.  For the past month, I have been beta-testing the new TuneUp for Mac, which promises to help people like myslef who cannot stand incorrect or missing music info.

TuneUp has been around for Windows users for some time now.  But it has just recently been announced for Mac.  It is an iTunes companion, so it places itself right next to iTunes.  This can be a little unwieldy if you use a larger iTunes window.  Check out the screenshot below from my 13″ MacBook.

Visually speaking TuneUp is not the most polished software because it tries to redraw itself as you move or resize iTunes, but this only leads to delays, lags, or awkward redrawings.

Appearances aside, how well does TuneUp work?  Pretty well, but obviously not perfect.  I threw about 500-600 songs at TuneUp in various states of disrepair.  Some had only a title, others were mistagged, and still others were the dreaded “Track 01″ from “Unknown Artist” and “Unknown Album”.  TuneUp did a good finding tags for all but about 30 of those songs.  Some of the tags it found were not my top choice for those songs (for example, it chose a greatest hits R.E.M. album instead of the original), but it was an admirable job for an automated solution overall.

TuneUp has additional features such as finding missing album art, looking up upcoming concerts, and finding YouTube videos of your music.  The album art feature is nice in that it does a better job finding things than iTunes’s own feature.

TuneUp is free for the limited version which will clean up to 500 songs.  The full version costs $19.95 onetime or $11.95 annually for a subscription.  I probably would not pay for TuneUp, but if you have mistagged songs or songs that are missing tags, then the free version of TuneUp is not a bad option compared to manually doing it all yourself.

Similar Posts:

• Impressions: iTunes 8
• Pandora Radio…Create Your Own Radio Station
• Impressions: Picasa 3 Beta
• Rumor Mill: iTunes 8
• Cage Match: Winamp vs. iTunes