A few months ago, I posted about the launch of TuneUp Media, my pal Gabe Adiv's company that offers a product to clean iTunes metadata. People seem to like the PC version and a Mac beta version is expected at the end of the month (finally). Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a tech page cover story on TuneUp Media and also mentions MusicBrainz Picard, a free metadata tagger that's been around for a few years. I haven't used Picard but friends tell me it doesn't work as well as TuneUp. TuneUp offers a free trial version–you be the judge! From the SF Chronicle:
(TuneUp) works by taking "acoustic fingerprints" of tracks in a playlist and referencing them against a database of 70 million songs.
TuneUp's software opens up along with iTunes, and users can drag songs from their playlists over to TuneUp's "Clean" tab to fix the metadata associated with a track. Other tabs allow users to find missing cover art or buy tickets to upcoming concerts…
Picard does not work within iTunes. Instead, Kaye suggests that iTunes users run their new music through Picard to clean up the metadata and then import the tracks into iTunes.
TuneUp's Adiv said a beta version of his software for Macs should be released later this month. Then, early next year, the company hopes to introduce similar plug-ins for Winamp and Windows Media Player.
TuneUp identifies the music you are hearing (SF Chronicle)
Previously on BB:
• TuneUp cleans iTunes library
