Great when it works horrible when it doesn
I have a pretty huge music collection with lots of ripped vinyl old non meta-datad CDs etc and am always looking to clean up so I was excited about tune up. I didnt want to risk my whole large music collection so I started on a smaller sub-collection on a laptop. Right away I was turned off my some somewhat spammy features (inserting cleaned by Tuneup into a tag by default, and always pushing you to a advertiser heavy tuneverse tab that is really a ploy to push affiliate links. These things thankfully can be turned off.
As to its actual function, cleaning up & normalizing a library, Tune Up is pretty good with a wide range of music. You can have it scan your library and generate a playlist of dirty music which you can then clean 1000 tracks at a time. It give you back a list of things its sure of and things its less sure of. The sure of list works great. No problems. But if your library is like mine, the less sure list will be much bigger than the sure list and ends up being too big to check individually. Worse there is no way to scan the less sure list to see what is being matched. I foolishly put my trust in the app and got burned. In the first 1000 titles scanned hundreds were correct, but there are also 100s of mistakes. Bad inexplicable mistakes where none of the original metadata seems to have been matched. Personal recordings were suddenly given Japanese names etc. This is bad stuff.
The cover art section of the app is equally maddinging. Strange results that seem to have nothing to do with the library and it doesnt allow you to do the thing you really want to do which is to drag in an album or two without art and see if it can find a match. Its a library wide thing or nothing. Frustrating.
The deduper is also pretty useless. I want to dedup albums much more than individual tracks. I had only 2 exact matches but hundres of likely dups. Scanning the list it seemed that few were actual dups. Most were just albums where a song was played twice…
Anyway ultimately I felt really screwed. $40 is the most Ive paid for software in a long time and I expected much more.
eggandwaffle about TuneUp
