The Download Blog

UPDATED: Trial not limited to 30 days, clarified YouTube video embedding.

I'm not a big fan of iTunes for Windows. Even though I have an iPod, I haven't used its software sibling in nine months. (That'd be enough time for Apple to gestate a better version, you'd think.) However, iTunes addicts who just can't break away might want to take a look at TuneUp Companion, a neat little plug-in recently out of beta. It does a much better job of album art downloading, track tag repair and discovery, and tracking down concerts by your favorite bands.

In terms of user interface, TuneUp Companion is a bit awkward.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

First thing to note with the program is that it installs as a sidebar on iTunes. If you're using the mothership in full-screen mode, or near enough to it, you're going to have to pull in the right edge of your jukebox before you can see what's going on. From there, TuneUp lets you register from within the add-on's sidebar.

The registration is boilerplate for Web sites these days. You don't have to contribute a credit card number, though, and that makes this an interesting replacement for the iTunes store. The new Genius bar is basically a repackaging of the old Apple hard-sell for the iTunes Store, whereas TuneUp Companion offers links to DRM-free Amazon under the now playing tab.

The program can clean song tags and discover new tracks, among other things.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Links in TuneUp include more than music purchasing, though. There's also a YouTube discovery feature, automatically pulling in links to related YouTube videos. Click on the link and video opens within TuneUp, which isn't quite as smooth as embedding the video directly--but it does save on space. Concert notifications are courtesy of StubHub, news comes from Google, and there's a bunch of eBay links, as well. These can be swapped around or minimized, but not completely hidden.

Other features include Clean, which fixes track metatag data that has been improperly maintained. This feature has been buggy in the past, although I didn't experience any crashes when testing it this time around. It doesn't come close to MediaMonkey's or Winamp's built-in tag repair, but it will make sure that your "RaDIOhed" tunes are spelled correctly and capitalized in the right spots. The album art locater worked well, having no problems with either popular or obscure albums.

Despite being fairly responsive, the plug-in's interface feels cramped and hectic, although that might be because it sits next to Apple's famously austere iTunes design. TuneUp Companion makes a good choice for people who want more out of iTunes, and it costs $20. The program limits you to 500 songs repairs and 50 album art downloads.

I use iTunes on both my Mac and Windows machines here at work. On my Windows box, it's not quite as smooth and takes up a few too many resources, but I still run it to listen to music from other users on my network. On my Mac, it couldn't be better, but I've found that the biggest problem I have with iTunes is not with the program itself.

In fact, even though it's mostly my fault, my music library is what gives me the most trouble. Like most people, I've gotten my music from a number of different sources so a lot of music is tagged incorrectly. My cover art is almost nonexistent so I can forget about using Apple's fancy Cover Flow feature. Some songs I accidentally added more than once, while others are from mix CDs where a song might read "Track 8" so I don't even know what it is until I listen. Certainly, I could spend a day going through each track, switch the tags, and grab the cover art, but who wants to spend all day Saturday sifting through their music library? Not me.

All of TuneUp Companion's tools show up to the right of your iTunes interface.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Fortunately, someone has developed an app to fix this situation, though it is not yet perfect. TuneUp Companion from TuneUp Media is an iTunes plug-in that helps you analyze and clean up a messy library in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually. The TuneUp Companion interface shows up to the right of your iTunes music library with features for cleaning up tags, finding album artwork, getting more info about artists, and genre-related music recommendations. You can also search concert listings in your area for bands in your library.

Get a list of likely matches before you save to your library.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

But does it work? Obviously, the feature that really caught my attention was the Clean tool. It takes an audio fingerprint of a mislabeled song, matches it against Gracenote's Global Media Database of more than 90 million songs, and returns most likely matches, which you can save to your library. It even recognizes songs from the same album so you can get both music and cover art in one fell swoop. In my testing, it worked almost flawlessly as long as I only chose groups of 50 songs at a time, but simply selecting my library and trying to clean it all at once seemed to bring the program to a crawl. I have to admit, even if it's just a batch of songs at a time, TuneUp Companion made organizing my library a whole lot easier than tagging each song individually, but ideally it would be a one-shot operation.

TuneUp Companion's other tools worked great. The Cover Art tool quickly scanned my library and offered covers for every artist it recognized (my library has everything from regular songs to sound effects to music my friends make, so it would have no chance to recognize it all). The Now Playing section offered up music videos for the artist playing, a link to StubHub concert tickets, and similar artist recommendations from Amazon, all accessible with a click of a button. The Concerts section let me know where I could see acts locally for all the music in my library.

Find concerts for your favorite bands under the concerts tab.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

TuneUp Companion isn't perfect, but it's definitely a great start. The development team assured me updates were on the way to iron out the few bugs remaining and a Mac client is due in the fall (for now TuneUp Companion is Windows only). The trial version listed here at Download.com offers 500 "cleans" and 50 cover art "finds"--not nearly enough for most libraries. An unlimited version of TuneUp Companion costs $19.95 for a one-time charge or you can get an annual subscription for $11.95.

Overall, I think that though TuneUp Companion was limited by how many songs it could clean at once, it did a great job of properly tagging my music library. If you try it out, be warned it will take some time processing groups of songs from bigger libraries, but with what I've seen so far, this is a giant leap for iTunes users who have been looking for a way to fix their listings (almost) automatically.