Review: TidySongs Fixes Your iTunes Collection

June 2, 2010 - By Erin Stuelke

TidySongs (Cloudbrain, LLC) is an organizational tool for your iTunes music collection.  It uses data already associated with your songs to look up and identify any incorrect or missing information.  As long as the song contains at least one correctly spelled word from the artist and song fields, TidySongs attempts to correct any mistakes in the artist name, song title, album title, track number, release year, genre and even add artwork if it’s missing.

TidySongs returns a confidence number (the “99%” seen above) that let’s you know how accurate it thinks the returned information is.  A number of 99% means the information is most likely correct, whereas a number of under 10% means the guess is most likely incorrect.  Manually changing or adding to any of the information could lead to a better search result.

Some other nice features of TidySongs include:

• Finding and removing duplicate songs
• Combining or renaming genres
• Adding album art
• Choosing which details get updated and which remain unchanged
• Auto-skipping songs based on user-defined words
• Fixing songs in a certain playlist
• Fixing songs one-by-one or all-at-a-time

The TidySongs UI is clean and easy to read.  Navigation is simple, but can sometimes be a little awkward.  While fixing songs, there is no “Back” feature allowing you to return to previously fixed songs.  Also, if you decide to change the album art, returning from that screen without choosing an album cover is impossible.

The speed at which it fixes a song can vary.  For the most part, information was returned in a just a few seconds.  However, there were some genres (such as classical music) that took 30 seconds or more to return song information.  After going through several hundred songs, the more well-known an artist or genre, the faster the search.

TidySongs claims 85% success rate when fixing songs.  During a session fixing approximately 50 songs, almost all them were identified.  The list included well-known Top 40 songs and some more obscure songs from video games or imports.  Small manual changes were needed for about half the songs in the list, but TidySongs identified all the popular music. Some of the rarer songs were fixed; but for the most part, most of those remained unidentified even with several manual changes.

A much larger test was done with over 900 songs.  Very little to no manual changes were made to any of the songs and TidySongs came out with about a 50% success rate.  The biggest problems encountered were situations were an album contained both an explicit version and a clean version.  TidySongs always defaulted to the clean version, unless the album name was manually changed to reflect the explicit version.  It also had some trouble identifying classical music, video game songs, and some soundtrack listings.  TidySong’s identification server contains over 4 million songs and is still growing.  So it’s likely some of the songs it couldn’t identify will be added in the future.

The are a couple advantages to using TidySongs over fixing your songs directly in iTunes.  First of all, it looks up your songs for you which iTunes doesn’t do.  Secondly, all the information you’re changing is on one tab, rather than several tabs.  TidySongs also has a direct link to the amazon.com page which you can use to make sure it’s chosen the right album and song.  Plus, the link to amazon is very helpful when TidySongs gets the information almost correct.  Since amazon links to CDs similar to the one you’re looking it, it’s easy to look through those to find the correct one and to manually update the information in TidySongs.

While the software is very handy and nice to have, there are some problems that will hopefully be remedied in future releases.  While fixing a song, you can link to an image URL and update the album art.  However, if the image URL is not from amazon.com, an unspecified error occurs and the song doesn’t get updated.  And unfortunately, you won’t know until you search back through the playlist in iTunes.  The best thing to do in this case is to change your artwork manually through iTunes itself.

The other major problem involved working with a large amount of music files.  During the 900-song session, only about 50 of the songs actually reflected the changes in iTunes.  The remaining songs, while fixed properly or skipped in TidySongs, did not get updated in the iTunes library.  No errors occurred during the process, so it’s unclear as to what happened.  Since this can be incredibly frustrating if it happens, the best idea is to fix songs in smaller subsets and check your iTunes library frequently to ensure changes are updated.

TidySongs is currently US$39.00 and can be downloaded directly from TidySongs.com.  It works on Windows and Mac OS.  It requires Adobe Air and a zip program for installation.  Since it links directly with iTunes, you will also need iTunes installed.  During runtime, iTunes should be open and idle so TidySongs can access the playlist and library information.

Overall, TidySongs is a helpful tool for music aficionados who will settle for nothing less than a clean and organized music library. For more information, visit the TidySongs’ Official Website, where you can download a free trial version of the software and try it yourself. (Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows versions available)

For the purposes of this review, TidySongs was tested on Mac OSX Snow Leopard.

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