12/11/2008, 8:45am, EST
Thursday, December 11th
TuneUp releases iTunes plug-in for Mac [video]
TuneUp Media has released the Mac version of its iTunes plug-in, which cleans up and organizes a user's music library. The plug-in also searches the Internet for music videos, recommendations and concert information based on a user's personal collection. The Windows version of TuneUp has been available for several months, and the company claims it has become "the most popular iTunes add-on" for that platform.
TuneUp works within iTunes to perform tasks like finding missing album art, correcting mislabeled tracks and cleaning inconsistent metadata. Gracenote's MusicID technology is used to locate missing titles or song information. The software operates through four tabs: Clean, Cover Art, Now Playing, and Concerts. Now Playing provides music recommendations much like Apple's Genius feature, along with YouTube videos, eBay merchandise and recommendations from Amazon. The Concerts tab lists upcoming events for artists in a user's music library.
A free version of TuneUp will be available for a limited time, allowing 500 "cleans" and 50 cover-art lookups before users must upgrade. The Gold version removes those limits and is available for a one-time charge of $20, or by annual subscription at $12. TuneUp requires an Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or later with iTunes 7 or 8. Support for Mac OS X 10.4 is expected soon.
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very buggy
I just installed it and found it very buggy and slow, also the fact it's a seperate application with its own window that somehow attaches to iTunes makes it very difficult to manage the window properly.
Beachballs constantly and eventually loses connection with the tune-up servers.
They were kind enough to provide an uninstaller (since they install frameworks in /Library/Frameworks AND they also install a bunch of UNIX libraries in /usr/local) -- although I found the uninstaller by accident while tracking down my Preferences.
It's in ~/Library/Logs and offers to uninstall everything including your preferences, which is nice.
Patrix.
Kitchen sink
Where's the Chat feature?
yes, very buggy
I agree with patrix.
Also, it generates genres which do not match the defaults used by iTunes, meaning that after it is finished one must still edit the information for these tracks.
I'll be deleting this app from my system until it hits 2.0.
Thanks to MacNN
Gabe Adiv here, CEO of TuneUp.
First off, thank you to MacNN for covering TuneUp.
Also wanted to respond to a couple of your comments:
We tested TuneUp for Macs for months prior to releasing it and improving performance was and continues to be a big priority for us. Such being said, what we’re finding is that while a handful of users are having issues with speed and performance, the majority aren’t. Really want to help make TuneUp work for you – feel free to contact me directly at gabeA AT tuneupmedia DOT com and we can figure out how to fix the some of the bugs that you guys have encountered.
In terms of the genres not matching iTunes, we use Gracenotes MusicID technology to provide metadata to our users. We are working on allowing users to choose which fields they want TuneUp to fill in, and which ones they’d rather leave as is. This should alleviate a lot of the concerns about inconsistency and be ready very soon.
Thanks for all of the great feedback – this sort of stuff (the good and the bad) are critical to developing a better product.
Not looking good here
sorry, but I have to confirm the other commenters.
1) this is clearly not an iTunes "plug-in". At most, an "add-on" would be more descriptive
2) i'm generally stuck with either a "contacting TuneUp Server message, or TuneUp server not available error message
3) when the server has been available and I try to drop even a single music file in, I just get stuck with the spinning beachball of death..... Haven't gotten a single lookup to work yet
No issues
I have 'tuned up' about 2000 songs so far and the application has worked without any issues. No beach balls, no 'missed' songs, etc.