James W Lane

I started this project months ago and between software developers dragging their feet and me being busy with other projects I let this sit on the back burner far too long. I have been suffering insomnia for the last week and I am currently fueled by eighteen cans of Dr. Pepper. So I decided since there was only one clear winner in this fight I will let the beat down commence.

The Challange: Organize 50,000 MP3

The Competitors: FixTunes & TuneUp

I took an external hard drive and copied 50,000 songs on it and ran them through a few applescripts and file naming software to make sure they where a nice chaotic mess.

FixTunes:

When I read over FixTunes I was impressed by the features it had to offer.

Edit MP3 Song Tags – FixTunes makes editing your songs tags incredibly easy. FixTunes will automatically download song information from an online database so you don’t have to type anything. If you prefer the hands-on approach, FixTunes makes manually updating your songs easy as well. You can type in the information you want directly or you can search the music database from within the FixTunes program.

Album Cover Art – FixTunes will automatically download the album cover art images for your songs from the Internet and add them to your files.

Rename and Organize Your Music Library – Using FixTunes, you can easily organize thousands of music files into folders on your hard drive. FixTunes will ask you how you want your files names (for example: “Artist Name – Song Title (Track Number).mp3″ and what type of folder structure you want to organize the files into (for example: “Music Folder \ Artist Name \ Album \ file”). All you have to do is answer a few questions and FixTunes takes care of the rest. FixTunes will also detect duplicate files and move the duplicate with the lower file size to a special duplicates directory that you can go through at your leisure.

Automated Organization – How long would it take you to manually go through all of your music and type in the correct information? With FixTunes, your entire music collection can be fixed and organized with just a few clicks. Here’s how it works:

* Step 1: FixTunes scans your computer / music folder(s) and finds your music files.
* Step 2: With two clicks, you tell FixTunes to begin looking for the correct information for your music files from the online database.
* Step 3: Once the correct information has been downloaded, you simply tell FixTunes (with one click) to fix and organize your music files. The correct information is added, album art is downloaded, folders are created and organized, duplicates are removed and files are renamed – all while you do something else (like sleep…).

Online Catalog Information – In addition to the correct tag data, FixTunes also downloads additional information about your songs and albums. From within the program, you have one-click access to a variety of sources including Google searches, Amazon.com catalog information, artist biographical information from Wikipedia and Amazon.com similar albums lists. FixTunes will also display details on the current album directly in the program’s interface: Artist, label, year, genres and track listings (so you can easily see which tracks you have and which you don’t).

Search Your Music – FixTunes makes every part of the library editing experience easy. There is always a search field visible on the program that will display search results of your music files as you type. You can quickly find the songs you are looking for and edit their information, view catalog data or album art all within the same window.

Music Database – The power behind FixTunes is a huge music database with information on over 4 million songs, albums and artists. FixTunes uses this database to look up the missing information in your songs (using the existing information) so you don’t have to type it in. The database links to other music sources on the Internet, allowing FixTunes to download album art for your songs and give you one-click access to artist bios and additional catalog information.

Easy to Use – FixTunes is easy to use. Most FixTunes users have multiple thousands of songs in their collections, and this program was built specifically for them. All actions, from browsing and searching for a specific song, to quickly editing details of multiple songs at a time is all performed in the main program – no extra windows are opened. Menu items and buttons are clearly labeled and do what you would expect them to. You will think FixTunes was designed just for you.

I was thinking wow this will be great so I got FixTunes and let it go after my test bed, and I can sum the results in one simple word “FAIL”. It took a week for FixTunes to tear though 50,000 songs and I would say that wasn’t bad but it crashed a total of seventeen times and when it got to the last 30 songs it got stuck in an infinate loop and wouldn’t complete. I emailed tech support asking how to fix this issue and tech support replied

“Thank you for letting us know. We have heard of this happening to a couple other users and we have created a new version to fix this issue. We will be releasing the update soon.

Thank you for keeping us updated about the issue. If you have the error logs you can send them in so that we can double check for further testing that we have the issue fixed.”

I recived this email on Apr 2nd and they have yet to contact me letting me know if they fixed the issue. As of this post the version I tested was 4.5 and whats on their site is 4.5.1 but I do not know if the issue has been fix and/or they don’t notify customers of updates “i.e. I actually purchased this product a month prior to start of testing” Since the software was stuck in a loop I couldn’t test out any of the other features that they listed. Now I will admit there automatic renaming and song reconizition is very good from my review of the songs. Its hitting about 93%. But since I couldnt fully test the software I stamp it a big fail. I will admit they claim the issue effects a small percentage of computers, but when I did some online research I’ve seen more negitive complaints than possitives. All in all FixTune has not only given me two free copy to give away to my readers but also a discount code for the rest of you guys.

I will pick two random winners a week from the post date and all you need to do to enter is follow me tweet this.

Enter to win a copy of FixTunes plus read about the battle between FixTunes & TuneUp - @james_w_lane – http://bit.ly/xAwIs (via @tweetmeme)

And hopefully you will have better luck then me with the software. For all of those who didn’t win use the discount code “DOA4E” for 20% off FixTunes.

TuneUp:

My friend recommended TuneUp to me and even thoght I wasn’t impressed by all its features I was still highly interested.

Clean: Automaticly fixes your mislabled music.

CoverArt: Automaticly fills your missing album art.

Concerts: Concert Alerts Based on Artist in your collection

Now Playing: Live Videos, Artist News and Cool Merchandise

Analyze: See whats missing from your collection then fix it.

Well I was considering this to be the underdog of the competition, didn’t really have many features I cared about other than renaming and album art, but I wrote them saying hey I am running your software through the ringer and they said have at it. Well TuneUp preformed like a champ. I love the interface and I like how it attached to iTunes. The only downside was you only can do 500 songs at a time, but even that didn’t take very long. Four days and 100 500 song tests and TuneUp was done. Now for song naming and album art I will give it about a 85-88% because there was a good number of songs it didn’t get the exact album; for example Song X by Artist Y on Album Z, TuneUp would Get Song X and Artist Y right but then use an album like Jock Jams or some other music compilation instead of the Original Album and Art Work. But other than that this software does what it says it does with out any problems.

Conclusion:

Well I will be honest, I was more interested in the features of FixTunes, but right now for usability and performance I will give TuneUp my seal of approval.

Now both these companys have new versions in the works and they both said I can test them when they are ready so this battle is yet to be over. The way I see it, it’s just begun.

Now remember retweet this to be entered into our give away and each retweet is an entry. So the more you tweet about it the more chances you have to win.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.