TuneUp is a program that works in conjunction with iTunes to go through all your generic music and clean it up: fixing metadata and grabbing cover art. I tried a free trial and found that it worked, so I bought it when I found it on sale a while ago.

I have copious amounts of unidentified music, because, uhh, I imported all of my legally-acquired music and lost the metadata. Lots of others have the same problem. Here’s a pretty good sample of what Cover Flow in iTunes looks like for me:

You’ll also notice that the album is called “Unknown Album,” but at least the artist is identified. I have more “Track 01” by “Unknown Artist” albums than is reasonable, and still more songs that are correctly labeled but that lack cover art.

I haven’t finished running my whole library through it yet, but here’s how it’s looking. For one, here’s a shot of it in action:

(Why on Earth aren’t my images being resized?!) As you can see, TuneUp is a sidebar that sits on the side of iTunes. You drag songs into TuneUp, and it’ll go off and try to identify each of the songs. Incidentally, this screenshot shows a pet peeve: the song it’s identifying is definitely not “Gotta Get That Money Mayne.” It’s really easy to understand how these things happen, but it’s still an annoying experience.

More annoying, though, is its tendency to correctly identify songs, but place them on strange albums. Compilations / mixes, such as the “NOW! 456” CDs are prime candidates. “A Long December” is apparently from a “Buzz Ballads,” by “Various Artists.” I have some really obscure songs, but Counting Crows aren’t among them. Oftentimes, I find that it’s correct, but in an annoying way. My copy of “Stairway to Heaven,” for example, is apparently a version recorded for the BBC that’s a bit longer than the ‘normal’ one. And although rare, it seemed to guess totally-incorrect songs here and there. (One song, whose name I don’t actually know, was named something in a foreign language from an artist of a very different genre.) Another time, I mistakenly let it name a song who was named completely correctly, it with something by “Various Artists.” Boo. I think these things come with the territory, though — taking audio files saved in lossy formats and uniquely identifying them can’t possibly be an exact science. Although sometimes, the mistakes are unforgivable, like renaming a Jay-Z song to a Dino song. Another song was correctly labeled but given cover art for “Inde – Rajasthan: Musiciens professionnels populaires” appearing to show a bunch of Indian musicians in traditional attire, which is not the cover art I would have chosen for a Jesse McCartney song.

Still, at the end of the day, it’s accurate a lot more than it’s wrong, so I’m willing to let it go. For $29.95, I think it’s worthwhile. If you’re feeling less sure, you can always give their free trial a go; it’s capped at 100 songs or so. But remember that it’s not perfect, and that you can’t just accept all its results unless you’re willing to have it give some of your songs incorrect names.