Get Rid of Dead Spots and Duplicates in Your Music Library
We tend to focus a lot on durable good clutter, but increasingly digital clutter is the nuisance du jour. While you might not need to get a storage unit to house it, it’s still a pain. It hogs RAM slowing down our computers, it makes us get external hardrives or increase our cloud backup for files we don’t need and most importantly, it makes finding files we do need exceedingly difficult.
One of the primary repositories of digital clutter is the music collection. Perhaps you imported a library from somewhere (in a highly legal manner) or you—heaven forbid—pressed “Add File to Library” more than once on iTunes. Suddenly, you have 5 files for “Sympathy for the Devil”—one listed under “Rolling Stones,” another under “The Rolling Stones” and a few as tracks 4, 6 and 11.
A service called TuneUp takes care of this issue, zapping duplicates as well as cleaning up your music library in other ways.
Tuneup offers a few services available bundled or à la carte:
- Clean your library by fixing mislabeled or missing song information (like “Track 01” or “Unknown Artist”) using waveform recognition.
- Scan your entire music collection and fill in missing album artwork.
- Find and remove duplicate music files from your music library using waveform recognition.
The full suite is available for $40 annually/$50 lifetime (includes one computer transfer). All services are available à la carte for $20 annually/$30 yearly. Tuneup is available for Macs and PC’s and works with both iTunes and Windows Media Player.
While this might strike some as steep, consider that digital media is an asset you might keep for a while. And just as you might have bought a CD-rack once upon a time, spending a few bucks to organize your MP3’s might be a worthwhile investment.