Plug-in Software That Fine Tunes iTunes

I generally like the way iTunes orchestrates my music collection, but sometimes it hits a wrong chord on the older and more eclectic CDs transferred to my computer.

That's why hundreds of songs in my iTunes library are missing the proper album artwork or have been lumped into loosely defined categories that don't truly describe the music genre.

For instance, the iTunes automated identification system believes that some songs by the B-52s, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Byrds all belong in the generic rock section. But these birds don't really flock together, do they?

If you're picky about music descriptions and want to find album artwork that iTunes doesn't have, it might be time to get a little help from a software program promising to fill the gaps in digital music collections. I turned to TuneUp, a plug-in application that competes against a similar program called FixTunes.

Drawing upon a database of 90 million songs, TuneUp can pore through thousands of tracks in iTunes within a few minutes to identify problems and offer solutions. It works on Macs and computers running Windows.

Unfortunately, the help isn't free: TuneUp charges $20 for a one-year subscription to its service or $30 for lifetime access. That's an increase from a recent one-time fee of $20 or a one-year subscription of $12, an indication that demand for TuneUp may be rising.

The product probably is worth the money for people like me who already had large CD collections before buying their first iPod. Once I got a portable player, all those CDs had to be ripped on to a computer.

When trying to identify an incoming CD transfer, iTunes relies on a database from Gracenote -- the same source that steers TuneUp. But TuneUp has access to a much larger and more sophisticated database than iTunes does, enabling the service to do a deeper analysis of each song. And TuneUp has built up its own digital warehouse of album covers, allowing it to find artwork that iTunes doesn't.

The artwork feature is by far the coolest thing about TuneUp. The software found new images for 346 songs in my iTunes library.

By Michael Liedtke -- AP

Image courtesy TuneUp Media

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