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By now, we hope you’ve read Rinse’s pros and cons.

As we know, Rinse is an MP3 cleanup program with the capabilities of TuneUp, but with a few less fancy features.  However,  as TuneUp (also known as TuneUp Media – not to be confused with TuneUp Utilities) offers more features, more bugs and more CPU usage is required to run the program.  We’ll get more into that a bit later.

Out of the two, TuneUp appears to be the more popular out of the two programs.  TuneUp is marketed more heavily than Rinse and is the program I’m currently using.  I used Rinse for several months and fixed plenty of songs, but the two programs are definitely much different and offer a much varied approach to updating your iTunes library.

Keep in mind, all information in your library is saved on your iTunesLibrary file in your Music folder.  This is a very important file, so make sure you back it up from time to time so you don’t lose all of the information you’re adding into your library.

“You’re cute, now just go away.”

It is important to note that one of TuneUp’s main features is that it runs side-by-side with iTunes or essentially acts as that puppy that follows you all the way home.  I don’t mean that in the endearing fashion, I mean that as more of a tag-along or something you can’t get rid of when you don’t feel like viewing it anymore.  However, Tuneup’s development team has improved this feature.  No longer is the Tuneup dock locked to the iTunes window.  The Tuneup dock is move able away from iTunes, which is a big step, particularly for myself, since I use dual monitors (one for screen entirely for iTunes at all times).

But in the end, Tuneup will be running as another open program and window on your computer which makes your computer work harder having TuneUp open alongside iTunes.  Running more programs such as your web browser (Firefox, Safari, etc.) while using the iTunes/Tuneup combo is not optimal.  As you click on each song, TuneUp is accessing information from its database to YouTube videos and a bio of each artist and several other processes in the background.  Your computer might get mad at you if you don’t have the proper system requirements.

System Requirements and other tidbits

Let me preface the system requirements with some good housekeeping advice: Keep a good working relationship with your computer.  No, I don’t mean that kind of relationship… Computers can’t love you back (yet).  What I mean is make sure that your computer has the power to run the programs on it first.  If your computer is 5 years old, it’s probably time for at least a RAM upgrade which can cost you about $40 and you can do yourself with the right guidance.

During my three months working with Tuneup (using Windows), I’ve encountered many, many issues with TuneUp, (which I will get into after this).  That’s not to say it won’t work perfectly for you depending what operating system and specs your computer has.  I will also preface this noting my CPU requirements are well above the minimum requirements posted on their website (double for most requirements, particularly for RAM and processor speed):

For PC

• Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7
• 20MB free hard drive space
• iTunes 8.2.1 or greater or Windows Media Player 10+
• Pentium 4™ processor or greater (Dual Core dramatically improves performances as we thread acoustic fingerprint generation)
• 2GB RAM
• DSL or Cable Internet connection (the faster, the better)
• No proxy or corporate firewall
• Digital music in MP3, M4A or WMA format

For Mac

• 64-bit Intel-based Mac running 10.6 or later (Snow Leopard or Lion)
• ~50MB free hard drive space (depending on your collection’s size)
• iTunes 8.2.1 or greater
• 1GB RAM
• DSL or Cable Internet connection (the faster, the better)
• Digital music in MP3 or M4A format
• No proxy or corporate firewall

The Issues, The Fixes…

What program doesn’t have issues?  As a starting point, iTunes is not perfect by any means, particularly with the introduction of the iCloud and iTunes Match (which I’m also running).

The most typical issues I’ve ran into when using TuneUp is a total freeze of my operating system.  This means I can’t do anything.  If iTunes is playing, it continues to play despite trying to close TuneUp.  In fact, TuneUp will not close and I resort to using the ‘End Process’ feature in the task manager.

So what’s the cause?  TuneUp’s support has been phenomenal.  And I truly mean that.  They’ve been very responsive (within two days at most), even following up to see if my issue has been resolved.  They’ll even offer you to run a bug-reporting tool while you’re using TuneUp to pinpoint your problem and help them further develop their product.  Unlimited support goes a long way, even if it doesn’t entirely fix your problem.

While the support has been amazing and the feedback given more than likely helps the product grow more stable, the issue more than likely resides in its compatibility with iTunes which leads me to believe the culprit is most likely iTunes Match.  As you know, iTunes Match is Apple’s solution to those who want their entire library anywhere they go on up to 5 devices for $25/year.  This includes being able to upgrade your songs to 256kbps.  iTunes Match (or iTunes for that matter) requires iTunes to stay on its toes.  If you change any information in iTunes including adding a song to a playlist, a play count, album art or even rating your song, it’s updated to the cloud.  Once that change is made, that particular track will reflect those changes on every device you own via the cloud.  However, that’s not saying that the devices syncing with the cloud or amount of devices syncing are the issue.

While the cloud is updating your track, TuneUp is continuing to keep up with your library.  One of the questions that repeatedly came up when troubleshooting with the iTunes staff was “How many smart playlists do you have?”.  As you may know from my previous posts, smart playlists are one of my favorite features of iTunes.  They help keep me organized and stay up on all of the music added to my library.

So why would a playlist have anything to do with latency issues related to TuneUp?  The reason is that smart playlists require iTunes to work a bit harder, match up those metrics which you’ve required the smart playlist to filter – everything from rating to dates added or dates skipped – thus increasing CPU usage.  Now let’s say you have 20 smart playlists or 40 in my case (431 playlists in all), which I’ve already given you a sneak peak into my favorite smart playlists.  This could cause TuneUp to work even harder to constantly sync itself with you library.  Since there are so many connections to each song, this could affect the ease at which TuneUp runs itself.  As I had mentioned, I am constantly running the Task Manager to see what I did that makes my CPU and iTunes work harder.

Although TuneUp still freezes up, it runs much smoother now than it did 3 months ago.  TuneUp in its own nature is a good, if not great program.  If TuneUp’s developers continue to stay the pace with the changes in iTunes, further improvements can only be expected.  The most common issue for me still remains switching active windows from iTunes to TuneUp.  Afterall, a basic requirement for fixing songs is to drag your songs from iTunes to TuneUp for ‘cleaning’.  Switching windows always seems to be the cause for latency.

What does TuneUp offer?

There are four products within the TuneUp program that are offered:

• Clean – Unlimited song clean ups
• Cover Art – Unlimited album covers
• DeDuper – Unlimited duplicate removals
• Tuniverse – Unlimited concert alerts, music videos, artist bios & more

The Clean feature is your right-hand man here.  In fact, it’s the only reason I bought TuneUp (and most likely the only reason you did or are debating doing so).  iTunes is such a great program, but lacks the one feature that would take it over the top.  Everyone’s library needs cleaning – everyone’s.

Why?  Well, for one, if you use Genius to make your mixes, iTunes uses all of the criteria in your music to make its decisions on what to play.  If you have an incorrect genre in there, you’ll be dealt a bad hand from iTunes Genius.  Genius pulls lots of information from your music to make accurate lists, the most obvious ones being from the fields you see – album name, artist, track number, rating (yes, rating!), and the often overlooked field – genre.  Create these three smart playlists if you haven’t done so already.

Even if you’ve imported all of your music from CDs, cleanup will still sync up all of the pertinent information in the event the album didn’t pull in correctly.  This includes CDs that are not recognized by iTunes and show up as ‘Track 1, Track 2, etc.’  TuneUps song cleaning feature is really amazing in that it actually listens to your song.  A song title and track name will pull up even if your song is titled Track 01!  This was a big plus for me before deciding to buy TuneUp.

Another reason to use the clean feature is for you iTunes Match users.  If your music isn’t matching up with what iTunes has in order for you to upgrade your MP3 quality to 256kbps, you need to clean up your library.  This will help iTunes recognize what the heck you’re trying to do.  Your iTunes library is only as good as the information it provides, which will help you create better playlists, organize your music and go from a mood-fitting playlist to a quick choice selection.

The Cover Art and DeDuper are some fancy little bonuses to Tuneup.  Nobody likes that ‘no album art’ picture in iTunes, so Tuneup fixes that if iTunes has no clue what to do.  For me, these make less sense to spend time on since iTunes has a ‘Show Duplicates’ feature and automatically downloads album art (although not all the time).  Further, TuneUp makes a bad habit of downloading low-quality album art which just drives me up the wall.  That means you not only need to delete the album art in iTunes, but make sure you have a good quality picture.  And if you have bad album art, it will automatically be saved to your cloud cache, meaning your mobile device will have that same crappy image.  This might seem a bit too picky, but if you’re into web design or just photo quality in general, you don’t want to see a pixelated version of The Beatles’ Abbey Road.

Further, if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber, iTunes will automatically show you a cloud symbol showing it will not sync with the cloud because you have a duplicate song.  The DeDuper has proven completely useless to me in this respect, but still remains to be a nice feature for someone with a small library who just doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Tuniverse is the most innovative tool here next to the Clean feature.  Tuniverse will pull all kinds of information on a particular track or artist while you are actively highlighting or selecting that song.  Guess what?  While you enjoy that song in iTunes, Tuneup appears to be mimicking your every move.  When a song is played, it displays a video in the Tuneup panel.  Tour dates will show and so will a bio of the artist along with a short background – which I believe is pulled from the source of all information on the web (or universe for that matter) – Wikipedia.  Hey, there’s even a sharing feature if you’re that kind of influential person.

Pricing

Here’s Tuneups latest pricing (screenshots below).  You can see, there are lots of options, a la carte if you will, if you decide you would much rather just get the clean feature for a year or not.  To me, getting the lifetime subscription makes the most sense not only because TuneUp is a market leader, which means updates will surely be delivered in the future, but also because maintaining your library will be a continuous thing.  You’ll regret it later not going lifetime if you have a large library and are a music-addict such as myself.  Pony up the $50 and just go for it.

TuneUp vs Rinse

Download TuneUp right now.  There’s no reason not to and I don’t mean that in a sales-pitchy kind of way.  You can try scrubbing down 50 songs for free in your trial and see what the program is all about, including how quick it runs on your system.  Try just a few Track 01 and 02s and you’ll be amazed.  You will, however encounter TuneUp trying to split albums, or change song names and the like, so don’t do a full library scan and just accept every fix suggestion it dishes out.  This is common for many cleanup programs out there.  However, once a song name is changed, TuneUp offers the option to undo that change.  Pretty neat, eh?

Vs Rinse – Rinse on the other hand does not have the option to undo your changes.  Rinse also does not “listen” to your songs like TuneUp does.  That means if you’re looking to find a track match for Track 01, often times it will not work in Rinse.

In terms of program speed and compatibility: I truly believe your library size will have a lot to do with the speed of the program, but there are still a good deal of bugs that need to be worked out and will continue to have as iTunes is further developed.  In some instances, there is no rhyme or reason for the program freezing up, particularly if I didn’t even do anything.

Ideally, I would like an easier way to hide the TuneUp window, but even more ideally, I would like some sort of TuneUp plugin to work within the iTunes interface.

Despite TuneUp’s flaws, I still prefer it over Rinse given the accuracy of song matches and it’s design to work with iTunes and iTunes Match.  However both offer free trials, so see for yourself and let me know what you think!  Tuneup continues to get better and I hope others are seeing that too.