When flipping through your cover art on your glistening new iPhone, do you ever come across tracks that feature a question mark where the cover should be? Do those question marks make you feel helpless?
If so, TuneUp might be the cure you need. The product is a plug-in for iTunes that identifies songs based on their “audio fingerprint.” It then uses this information to fix any any mislabeled tracks and link them to the correct cover art. It also scans your entire collection and displays upcoming concerts, relevant videos from YouTube and artists’ bios in a sidebar. Cool, right?
Quite, but there’s a catch: If you’ve got a Mac, you’ll just have to wait. Oh, there’s another thing: It’s not entirely free. For users without a ton of jumbled tracks lacking cover art, the free version will fix 500 tracks and find 50 missing covers — more than enough for me but probably not for those with voluminous collections. Those people will pay $11.95 per year or a one-time fee of $19.95 to get their tracks tuned up.
I suspect many people, accustomed to paying nothing for a range of convenient online services, will balk at the price, especially since it’s only truly useful once. But if you’re among the people battling in iTunes chaos spread across hundreds or thousands of tracks, this is probably worth the money.
