Thursday, July 30, 2009

Meta-iPod: iTunes tune up

I followed up on yesterdays post on iTunes updating and organizing your music. I’ve found over time your music can accumulate duplicate tracks, missing album artwork, messed up names and so on. I downloaded and tried out meta-iPod: the iTunes cleaner. It works pretty well and I thought I’d share may experience here.

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First you’ll want to start up iTunes then start up Meta-iPod. This is the current version 1.61.

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To start analyzing you click on the great big green Start! button.

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The program will start analyzing your data.

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Individual buttons will become colorized as they become available. The red numbers below indicate the number of tracks affected. You then select one to work on. I didn’t try every feature but, I’ll touch upon a few.

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Fix Duplicate Tracks: As the name implies you can eliminate duplicate tracks with this feature. You can auto-select the choices or manually click the ones you want to clean up. After you made choices click on “Delete checked tracks” and say good bye to clutter.

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Fix No Album Art Tracks: One of my pet peeves about iTunes is that they miss a lot of album art  especially from ripped CD’s. This feature let’s you add album art from multiple sources so chances are you’ll find what your looking for.

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When you double click on a selection it will search for artwork from multiple locations on the web. I’ve found this can be a bit slow depending on your Internet connection and hardware. Also I seem to get a small glitch like the one below:

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I haven’t investigated this problem yet. I clicked on “Continue'” and I was to proceed without much of a problem.

Screenshot - 7_30_2009 , 12_50_36 PMContinuing on,   when you scroll down and find artwork that matches your selection you double click it and it will be added to all selections from the same album. When you click on “OK” it will update iTunes.

Despite the minor glitch in the artwork selection I liked this software very much and I do recommend it.

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