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.

 

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

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

The program will start analyzing your data.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

Continuing 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.

Technorati Tags: itunes,meta-ipod,tune up,apple,ipod,music

Ripping CD's with iTunes

I personally use iTunes for my music needs on the PC. It's fairly simple and intuitive in my opinion. Until recently I used to just plunk my CD in my PC and played it. My hard drive space was limited so I was trying to conserve space. Recently after upgrading my hard drive I tried my hand at "ripping" my CD's onto my PC. I've come to favor Apple's iTunes player. Though there are others I'd just thought I'd share a little of my experience and give a very basic tutorial on this subject. I'm going to assume you've already have iTunes installed and CD's in hand. Here we go....

1. First of all you open your iTunes program either by click on your desktop icon or programs menu.

2. Open your CD/DVD player and insert your CD of choice. At this point you'll wait for iTunes to gather information on your CD. This shouldn't take too long.







3. When iTunes is done retrieving information you'll get a pop-up asking if you'd like to import(aka: Rip) your CD onto iTunes. You wish to rip entire CD click on "Yes". If wish to select certain songs click "No" and see step 4. Now sit back let the PC do the rest. iTunes will play the music as it's importing your CD.





4. After you've clicked "No"(see step 3). Uncheck the songs you don't want from the list. Then click "Import CD" button on lower right hand corner of iTunes window. It will then "import" only the songs that are check marked.

Well there you have it. It's fairly simple. There are other settings and stuff you can get into but I just wanted to cover the basics here. I've got addicted to adding my music myself. I hope this was informative and helpful. Thanks for reading and "Long Live Rock!"