Itunes Cleanup
If you own a closet filled with clothes, you know what it is like to have a mess that needs to be sorted and cleaned up. Well, your iTunes music collection is no different at all.
Sometimes too many songs that you have are not tagged properly, many of them are missing album names and artist names, some may have wrong track titles and most may not have any album art. If you were to try to clean up your music collection manually, this would take weeks of tedious work, to say the least.
The way to alleviate this situation is to perform a quick and successful and almost hassle-free iTunes cleanup.
Here are some tips to help you achieve this goal:
Do a back-up of your iTunes library
Delete the music that you do not want to keep
Do a manual deletion of all duplicates
Make use of software to remove bulk duplicates, especially if you have a large library
Remove deleted files which remain listed in your library
When your library is free of duplicates and deleted files, you can backup and convert to MP3
Fix meta data or information, erroneous song titles or album info – try fixing one album or folder at a time and saving over your back-up
Rebuild your iTunes library after making sure of your back-up above
Sort out and update your album artwork
You may decide to go the way of subscribing to a software to do this job for you. Enter ‘Tune Up’, your music’s new best friend, as some refer to it. The TuneUp iTunes cleanup product can be subscribed to free of cost, cleaning up to 500 songs. Over and beyond that, you can sign up for a one year unlimited song clean up subscription for $11.95, as well as a life time subscription of $19.95 (limited offer).
The TuneUp iTunes plug-in is by far the easiest way to clean up all the patchy and scattered information in your iTunes. All you have to do is drag and drop songs into TuneUp.
How does the TuneUp iTunes cleanup work? Remembering that every piece of music, no matter from what source, contains a certain audio signature, TuneUp will then compare that signature with the online music database ‘Gracenote’. It will then retrieve all the information and album art about the song and simply put it in iTunes. Voila!
TidySongs is another automatic cleanup tool which will alleviate the painful manual process of going through one song at a time to fix the missing information on your song list. If you choose to go this route, all you have to do is to download the TidySongs application. Because it is an AIR application download, once the download is finished, you will end up with a ZIP file on your desktop. Once unzipped, the application is ready to be launched. Just a note of caution should you choose to take advantage of TidySongs: once you launch the application, make sure your local iTunes application is running and not engaged with other activities, for example, synching to your iPod, iPhone or other music players or downloading of podcasts.