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Clean icon

Clean is a two-step process. First, you drag-and-drop one or more songs from iTunes to TuneUp. Then, you verify the results and click Save. TuneUp identifies tracks by taking an audio fingerprint of each one and sending them to an online reference database.

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Overview

The Clean process is started by dragging and dropping songs from iTunes onto the Clean tab in TuneUp.

  1. Click on the Clean icon on the top menu bar (Figure 1)
  2. Select songs in iTunes, drag them over on top of TuneUp and drop them into the Clean area (Figure 2)
  3. TuneUp will immediately start identifying your songs

The song identification process can take a long time. TuneUp is finding the song in iTunes, decompressing it, creating the uniquely identifiable acoustic fingerprint, sending it to the online reference database and sorting through the multiple matches. Your computer performance and environment greatly affect the speed of Clean. External USB drives and networked drives are very slow. Multi-core processors are much faster as we thread multiple fingerprint generations.

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 Use Shift-click to select multiple contiguous files in iTunes

Lightbulb icon Tip #2 Use Ctrl-click to select multiple separated files in iTunes (or Command + Click on a Mac)

Lightbulb icon Tip #3 TuneUp works best when you look up entire albums at the same time

Matches

Results bins

[Reviewing the results in the Matches and Likely Matches bins and saving the information back to iTunes.]

As results start to come back from the acoustic fingerprints and online lookups, they are merged into albums and given a confidence rating . Results with high confidence are placed in the Matches bin and songs with a medium confidence rating are placed in the Likely Matches bin. (Figure 3)

Steps to save the metadata back:

  1. You can expand each Album result in the bins by clicking on the arrow icon to the left of the Artist name (Figure 4) to see the matched tracks.
  2. Unselect/Select songs from the results by unchecking/checking song names in the opened album (Figure 5)
  3. You can play the songs in the album by clicking the button to the right of each song name (Figure 5)
  4. Click the Save button and the results for this album will be saved to back to iTunes. This can be a time-consuming process if your collection is very large or if your collection is on an external drive.

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 Use Shift-click to select and deselect albums so you can save just those selected in one shote. Save All button will change to Save Selected

Lightbulb icon Tip #2 Add to Collection (Buy) from iTunes

Lightbulb icon Tip #3 If you don't finish saving and close TuneUp or power down your computer, the songs left in Matches & Likely Matches will be saved and appear next time TuneUp is launched.

Lightbulb icon Tip #4 Entire bin can be expanded and collapsed with the icon next to the Bin name (Figure 6)

Lightbulb icon Tip #5 You can quickly hop between the multiple bins using the Jump To pull-down menu at the top of the Clean interface (Figure 7)

Lightbulb icon Tip #6 If your songs already contain cover art, the Clean function will NOT overwrite them. If you would like to replace the existing cover art, you have to remove them first in iTunes (using Ctrl-I)

TuneUp Playlists (PC Only)

As you Analyze and Clean, TuneUp creates various playlists for you to quickly manage your cleaning process (Figure 8). After you Analyze, TuneUp creates a Playlist called Dirty. This playlist will include tracks that are missing at least one of the seven key metadata fields. Once you drag-and-drop songs to be cleaned, if any are not in our database, they are put in a playlist called Not Found. You can periodically try these songs again to see if they have been added to our reference database. Finally, once you clean songs, they are put in a playlist called (surprise) Clean. A new playlist is created for each category every time you go through the respective step.

Analyze icon

Analyze is a sub-feature of Clean which tells you how many songs in your collection need cleaning. It looks at seven key information (metadata) items to determine whether they are dirty.

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Using Analyze

  1. Launch Analyze by clicking on the brain icon in the top right corner of the Clean interface (Figure 1)
  2. Click the Analyze button to start the process. Once done, Analyze will display an overall rating (a breakdown by item with the percentage of songs in your collection that are missing each one of the 7 items (Figure 2). TuneUp will also create a playlist for Cleaned, Dirty, and Not Found tracks (Currently PC-Only).

Lightbulb icon Please note: Playlist creation is currently PC-Only.

Cover Art icon

Cover Art scans through your collection, identifies songs that are missing art and then searches various web sources for artwork which you can save back to iTunes.

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Overview

  1. Click on the Album from the list
  2. Select the correct album cover from the four results (Figure 1)
  3. Click Save

Zoom feature

Starting in TuneUp 1.1.9 (on PC) and 1.0.7 (on Mac) we've implemented the ability so zoom in on an image to see the quality of the album art we find. Click on any thumbnail to see a larger thumbnail (Figure 2). Click and hold your mouse on this larger thumbnail to zoom in even more and display the dimensions of the cover. (Figure 3)

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 Use Save All button if you would like the first result on all albums in the list view

Lightbulb icon Tip #2 If an album isn't found, it's looked up again the next time you launch.

Lightbulb icon Tip #3 If you add songs to iTunes after you've launched TuneUp or cleaned songs which adds cover art, then the Cover Art tab starts to get a little out of sync with iTunes. You can click Refresh on the top right of the Cover Art interface to synch TuneUp with iTunes.

Analyze icon

Undo reverts songs you've cleaned with TuneUp back to their original metadata. If you've accidentally saved incorrect metadata, Undo can bring these songs back to their original state.

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Overview

  1. Launch Undo by clicking on the back arrow icon in the top right of the Clean interface (Figure 1)
  2. Drag-and-drop songs you want to revert back from iTunes to TuneUp
  3. Click the Undo button next to the song you'd like to Undo or click Undo All to revert all songs

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 You can only Undo songs that have been cleaned by TuneUp. If you try to drop songs not cleaned by TuneUp, they will not appear in the Undo tab

Lightbulb icon Tip #2 TuneUp's Undo function has some limitations: It will only remember one level of edits and it doesn't remove any cover art it added (you must do this manually within iTunes).

Now Playing icon

Now Playing automatically presents you with the best the world wide web has to offer about the song you are currently playing: YouTube videos, recommendations, news, and merchandise.

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Overview

Each individual widget can be moved up and down within the Now Playing tab. (Figure 1) As you move the mouse over the top of the widget, the mouse cursor will change to arrows. Simply click and drag the widget by its header. TuneUp remembers order next time launched

  1. Using the Videos widget
    • Click the image with the play icon to play the video in the TuneUp Now Playing widget. This will pause any music playing in iTunes
    • Click the video title (text) to launch your default browser to the exact page with this video. This way you can play it full screen, comment or email it
  2. Using the Concert Notifications widget
    • The Concert Notifications widget will automatically display any concert in your area for the artist currently playing.
    • You can change the Change button to open up the dialogue box where you can enter a new City/State/Country. (Figure2)
  3. Album Recommendations
    • Click title to read review (if available) (Figure 3).
    • When you hover over the recommended album, if the mouse cursor changes to the hand icon then this means you can click to open the review.
    • If you click on the Buy button, your default browser will launch and point to the exact page where you can purchase the CD.
  4. eBay (Tickets, Merchandise, Music)
    • The three eBay widgets show you live auctions in the top three music categories: Tickets, Merchandise (eg. Posters, t-shirts, ticket stubs) and Music (mostly used CDs and vinyl)
    • Note that the pricing shown in the display is slightly delayed and may be higher once you click the link to load the auction in your default browser.
  5. Bio Widget
    • The Bio widget shows you information about the artist you're currently listening to.
    • Bios are pulled from Wikipedia and Freebase, and you can use the links at the bottom of the widget to launch the full bios on the specific sites. (Figure 4)

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 Each widget can also be collapsed or expanded by clicking the arrow next to the name of the widget.

Lightbulb icon Tip #2 Concert update frequency: Concert notifications are run once every day on the TuneUp side so it may take some time before a new concert shows up if you've recently added music to your collection.

Concerts icon

Concerts automatically displays concerts in your area for all the artists in your location

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Overview

Concerts scans your collection for the artists you love, then displays concert listings for your chosen location.

Change Location

You can change the Change button to open up the dialogue box where you can enter a new City/State/Country. (Figure 1)

Refresh

Concerts searches for your artists in your collection periodically. If you remove artists or recently add new ones, they won't necessarily be reflected in the Concerts tab. To refresh the list, click the Refresh button

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 Click on the ticket supplier's icon/name to open a browser and purchase ticket.

Update icon

Update is TuneUp's built-in mechanism that notifies you when updates are available for you to download and install.

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Overview

TuneUp has a built-in mechanism that notifies you when updates are available for you to download and install.

PC: Check for updates

You can check for updates by right-clicking on the icon in the systray (bottom right of your screen) and selecting "Check for Update" (see Figure 1). This runs the Updater which connects to the TuneUp servers and looks for any new available components. (Figure 1)

PC: Upgrading

When an update is available, the Updater will notify you of the features of the new update (Figure 2) and will step you through the update process.

Mac: Check for updates

Checking for updates on a Mac is accomplished by clicking the Finder bar icon (Figure 3) or by right-clicking anywhere in the app and selecting "Check for Updates". If you're on a PC, the TuneUp icon in your system tray provides the same functionality. (Figure 4)

Mac: Upgrading

When an update is available, the Updater will open a dialogue box (Figure 5) to download and install. TuneUp will close and then be sure to be patient to wait for the new TuneUp to download and reinstall.

Lightbulb icon Tip #1 iTunes updates might affect TuneUp's operation. Completely uninstall iTunes 7 before upgrading to iTunes 8.

Preferences icon

Preferences allows you to configure some of TuneUp's features and user interface elements to your liking.

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Overview

TuneUp has various configuration preferences that affect how the application behaves.

Launching Preferences

PC: Right-click on the TuneUp icon in the system tray (right side of the Windows taskbar) to open the menu and then click Preferences. (Figure 1)

Mac: All versions have access to the preferences by right clicking anywhere in TuneUp. (Figure 2) Versions 1.0.2 and later can also open the preferences menu by clicking on the TuneUp menu bar item. (Figure 3)

Show Advertisements

You can turn the advertisements in TuneUp Gold on or off.

Show help tips

Tips can be turned on or off globally

Remove "featuring" and "feat." From Artist

Some results for Artist name will have extra information about featured artists. This is particularly prevalent in Rap and Hip-hop. For example, the song LAX from Snoop Dogg's Tha Blue Carpet Treatment album will be listed with the artist as "Snoop Dogg Feat. Ice Cube". TuneUp can remove the featuring or feat. after the artist name.

Merge artists names with "And", "&" and "and"

Many artists have put out albums with various backup bands or supporting artists. Turning this feature on will modify the Artist name by removing everything starting with "and", "&" and "And."

Remove "(disk)", "(vol)", etc. from Album Names

This preference normalizes the Volume number from the Album name in Multi-Volume disks. Sometimes, with multi-disk album lookups, the results can have uneven wording of the Disk volume. For example, if you have the 5 CD set of Miles Davis - The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions

Clean results can come back as:

  • The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions [Disk 1]
  • The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions [CD2]

Since alphabetically "CD" comes before "Disk", iTunes would list CD2 before Disk 1. This feature tries to find these inconsistencies and normalize them to a single word so that your iTunes presents the correct order.

Default Tab

You can select which of the four Tabs (Clean, Cover Art, Now Playing, Concerts) you'd like to be the start up tab when you launch TuneUp.

Email notifications

Click the checkbox to receive email notifications from TuneUp. These emails include important update notifications and urgent technical issues as well as marketing emails such as concert notifications.

Language

Preference to change the User interface language. Important: Note that changing language also changes the Genre metadata language. For example, Goth will become Gótico for Spanish. Changing language also changes some of the data sources. You must relaunch TuneUp for the language change to take effect.

Launch with iTunes

Starting with 1.1.9 on PC and 1.0.7 with Mac, you can now enable or disable auto-launching with iTunes (by popular request!). (Figure 4)