A few cool things I’ve found myself looking at today:
- Leatherman Skeletool. I have one of their old-school multi-tools, but it’s huge. This is a trimmed-down version that looks much slicker.
- TuneUp, a program to clean up your iTunes libraries. (Found via Uncrate.) It’s supposed to find names for your music to keep things accurately labeled, and also download missing cover art. I haven’t tested it yet, though.
TuneUp looks to be pretty slick to me. One problem I have is that it’s quick to recommend unhelpful titles like “Mixed Music Pop Hits” by “Various Artists.” In this case I may actually lose data if I tried to let it do its thing. Another one was by “Varios Artistas,” the same thing but not even in English. Chingy isn’t that obscure, is he?
Others just weren’t recognized at all. I can see some of them (Dan Deacon may not be that popular), but it also had no clue how to categorize what was once a chart-topping track. Dave Matthews isn’t recognized?
And then there are the errors. One Dan Deacon song was identified as being Mino Reitano’s Una Chitarra Cento Illusioni, which sounds quite unlike Ohio, which is what the song actually was.
It doesn’t advertise to get 100%, though maybe if they partnered with Pandora, they could get really close. But from testing a couple dozen, I don’t think I’m going to buy it. It got more than half right, but that’s a pretty bad statistics. Something like 3/4 of those that it did get right were identified as “Various Artists” on a mix track. Although it happened with comical frequency, it was really much more annoying than comical.
I’d dub it a very interesting service to watch, but not one that I’d pay for until the accuracy improves.
…I guess it depends on how disorganized your iTunes Library is. As an incurable obsessive-compulsive, I can’t bear to have things in iTunes utterly unlabeled. When I copied music from my iPod I wound up with a few things with cryptic, inaccurate names. It nailed a few of them, so it’s an improvement in many cases. I’m slowly becoming more impressed. Maybe my standards were just too high.
Oh, but a feature enhancement idea: I have many duplicates. iTunes can show you obvious duplicates, but not all of them: “Track 01” and “Barracuda” may be identical files, but with different names, and they wont’ get matched. More frequently, I have the same situation with different files: I may have a crappy 64 kbps (!) MP3, and then the full AAC version from iTunes. I want something that will Do the Right Thing ™ and de-dupe my library, always leaving me with the best version of a song.
And the “Various Artists” thing isn’t as bad as I’d thought. It does get the artist for the song.