A while ago I discussed a bunch of tools to be used with your iTunes library. One of the categories was library organisers, and here’s dedicating an entire post on them. Unlike you and me, a lot of iTunes users don’t organise their library, meticulously tagging songs, adding ratings, artwork, and making sure that there are no loose ends. “Track x” and “unknown artists” are no stranger to their libraries. Luckily, the world of music has consolidated itself into catalogs spanning millions of songs and artists, all of which can be computed to detect patterns. These patterns are then matched with a database, which can pin point the exact data coinciding with that pattern.
So far there are three app-services on the Mac platform capable of doing such computation. I’m here to look at user interface, ease of use, efficiency, and the expansiveness of its catalog. Let’s start with SongSergeant
SongGenie
A product out of Equinux, a well known Mac software establishment, SongGenie reeks of ‘Mac-like’. Equinux is known for their slick user interfaces, and SongGenie doesn’t disappoint. It looks like a darker, alternative version of iTunes without the sidebar.
Operating the app is dead simple. You can see all your tracks, or just the ones that need tagging. The front end of the app is ‘time machine like’, as it scrolls back and forth from the previously selected song. To identify a song(s), right click and select “Identify”. They’re then queued up, as each one is sent across to the cloud, and down again. Once identified, they sit in the approval queue. Approving them is just as easy and intuitive.
In my tests, SongGenie managed almost all of the tracks except some hindi songs, and live performances. Complaints? Yes I do have a big complaint, and that’s album artwork. While I do use iTunes to get my artwork, I do think an iTunes tagging app should also do artwork. Instead they expect you to buy the separate CoverScout app, which loosely integrates with SongGenie.
Song Sergeant
Featuring a much more utilitarian—even if ‘boring’—look than the rest, Song Sergeant by LairWare Soft. is no slouch. It identifies four types of problems, from ‘duplicates’, inconsistencies, orphans, and “missing’ as in, dead tracks.
iTunes has a duplicate finder, but it brings up live performances along with studio recorded tracks. Song Sergeant will intelligently avoid live performances while bringing up duplicates. It also brings up duplicates from different albums, so if you have a greatest hits album, you might not want those stray singles to linger. And best of all, Song Sergeant will auto select the best quality track, and merge the metadata like playcount when deleting one of the tracks.
The inconsistencies feature finds things like missing capitals, extraneous dashes, and other such tags, and offers suggestions on what it should be. You do need to go through the list properly though, for a lot of the ‘inconsistencies’ are actually the way things are supposed to be.
Orphans are those music files that exist in your iTunes folder, but aren’t referenced in the library. You can either trash them, or add the entry into the iTunes library (and even add them to an “Adopted” playlist). Missing is just the opposite of Orphans, which are songs referenced in your library, but don’t link to a file on your hard drive a.k.a., dead tracks. You can remove any such files.
Unlike the others, Song Sergeant doesn’t hook up to any online database, but merely uses its algorithms to come up with a better iTunes library. You can’t for instance get the track names for all those unknown artists floating around in your hard drive. Which is a shame, considering the rest of the features it offers are top notch. At $20 for a license, you can run the trial to identify any problem tracks; only a registration will allow you to make a change.
TuneUp
A much bigger outfit than the other two, TuneUp made big news when it launched its Mac client. TuneUp is an app that’s heavily tied to internet, and claims to automagically clean up your iTunes library. It’s good.
Yes, it looks the same on Windows
So what can TuneUp do? It mainly deals with album covers, and tagging. Click the Album covers tab, and you’re presented with a list of all your tracks without covers, and one click suggestions pulled from the web. And it’s really good, grabbing stuff even for podcasts and obscure tracks. Get into the tagging section, and you can drag in whatever songs you want to ‘clean’. Tuneup will pull down info one by one, and they’re then ready for tagging. The beauty of TuneUp is its workflow is super fast. Click click click, and you’re done with your music.
Alas, TuneUp isn’t content with just keeping things clean; it wants to be with your iTunes library at all times. TuneUp launches along with iTunes, automatically resizes the window to be able to fit its tall window on the right side of your screen. I’m not sure how to tell exactly, but it looks like a Java app and uses the Gecko (Firefox) engine. Its little sidebar stint looks totally weird on the Mac desktop, and it’s sluggish. When TuneUp is not working on your media (which I assume is most of the time), it wants to show you more info about the songs you’re playing. Those ‘social’ kind of features that are present in Songbird. All of this makes the whole process of bringing up iTunes and hiding it incredulously slow. You can thankfully prevent TuneUp from starting along with iTunes.
Is TuneUp a bad app? No. It does what it’s supposed to do, but along with it comes crud that I’d rather not see on my system. Considering it’s a Java app, it should at least have the decency to stay there only when called, and not flaunt itself at all times. Costs $20 for a yearly license, or $30 for a lifetime license. The free version allows you to clean 100 tracks and get 50 album covers.
Of all the three
Which one did I like the best? It depends on the state of your iTunes library really. If you’re the type with a lot of dupes and dead tracks, Song Sergeant will do the trick. For pure tagging, SongGenie is an excellent choice, with a brilliant user interface and reliable backend. And for a more all round tagging+artwork+crud experience, TuneUp does what it’s supposed to do. I can’t really compare whether SongGenie’s ‘MusicIP’ database is stronger than Gracenote, as I don’t have music that’s way out of mainstream media. I’ve heard these databases have trouble with classical or jazz music, or foreign stuff (Bollywood). It did identify all the bollywood tracks I could feed it, but again, they were kind of mainstream. For what it’s worth, they both worked equally well for 98% of my tracks.
Word of advice. I’ve seen reports of these tools messing up the library and such, so if you treasure your music collection, make sure you keep a backup before attempting anything major.
Let me know what you’ve been using.
