cleaning up new songs in iTunes

I've never tried it, but look at the app Tagalicious on the mac app store once you get your MBP's. It's an app that supposedly looks through all your songs and changes it all to the correct info. If you try it lmk how it works, seems to have good reviews.

wimberlyutk said:

So, here's the scoop...I am new to the whole Apple family; hardware and software. My wife has had an iPod for a while and installed iTunes on our computer so that she could put songs on her iPod. Other than that, we haven't done anything with Apple products.

Professionally, we are moving to Apple products. I recently purchased an iPhone 4S, we will be purchasing New iPads with built-in 4G and replacing PC laptops with MacBook Pros. So, moving everything over to iTunes (and then iTunes in the Cloud) just makes sense.

Here's my problem. I have over 70 GB of music I listen to on other players. Most of it is old music that I have had for years. CD's from the 90's-on copied to my HDD. I have a number of songs that are duplicates, many lack data such as albums, etc. Some have wrong artists (mostly in the form of listing multiple "feature" artists as main artists, etc.). I want to move all of this music to iTunes and clean up the songs prior to moving this data to "the Cloud." Plus, I really want to get rid of duplicates and bad info in addition to helping organize the music files by artist, album, etc. I'm not too worried about album artwork, at least for now.

The local Apple store told me I can "drag" the songs into iTunes but from there I have read so much info that I am lost. What is the best way to "clean" the data before moving it to "the Cloud?"

Thanks...

Click to expand...

Hello, I use TuneUp program, you can buy it from App Store.

iTunes have a function: display duplicates. Good place to start.

I have used both TuneUp and Tagalicious, and prefer Tagalicious. If you go with Tagalicious, I would recommend getting the version right from the website (thelittleappfactory.com) as opposed to the Mac App Store because the version on the MAS doesn't let you search for and insert lyrics for the songs. I still did a lot of manual tweaking of the metadata after the fact, but that's because I'm extremely anal about the metadata, so YMMV.

Related?

wimberlyutk said:

So, here's the scoop...I am new to the whole Apple family; hardware and software. My wife has had an iPod for a while and installed iTunes on our computer so that she could put songs on her iPod. Other than that, we haven't done anything with Apple products.

Professionally, we are moving to Apple products. I recently purchased an iPhone 4S, we will be purchasing New iPads with built-in 4G and replacing PC laptops with MacBook Pros. So, moving everything over to iTunes (and then iTunes in the Cloud) just makes sense.

Here's my problem. I have over 70 GB of music I listen to on other players. Most of it is old music that I have had for years. CD's from the 90's-on copied to my HDD. I have a number of songs that are duplicates, many lack data such as albums, etc. Some have wrong artists (mostly in the form of listing multiple "feature" artists as main artists, etc.). I want to move all of this music to iTunes and clean up the songs prior to moving this data to "the Cloud." Plus, I really want to get rid of duplicates and bad info in addition to helping organize the music files by artist, album, etc. I'm not too worried about album artwork, at least for now.

The local Apple store told me I can "drag" the songs into iTunes but from there I have read so much info that I am lost. What is the best way to "clean" the data before moving it to "the Cloud?"

Thanks...

Click to expand...

I was also looking for some itunes tagging and organizing tool, other than the manual removal of duplicates and ran across your post. Not related to your post but just curious. where you are from? I am a 'Wimberly' too. Is that your name?.. I'm in Texas..

wimberlyutk said:

So, here's the scoop...I am new to the whole Apple family; hardware and software. My wife has had an iPod for a while and installed iTunes on our computer so that she could put songs on her iPod. Other than that, we haven't done anything with Apple products.

Professionally, we are moving to Apple products. I recently purchased an iPhone 4S, we will be purchasing New iPads with built-in 4G and replacing PC laptops with MacBook Pros. So, moving everything over to iTunes (and then iTunes in the Cloud) just makes sense.

Here's my problem. I have over 70 GB of music I listen to on other players. Most of it is old music that I have had for years. CD's from the 90's-on copied to my HDD. I have a number of songs that are duplicates, many lack data such as albums, etc. Some have wrong artists (mostly in the form of listing multiple "feature" artists as main artists, etc.). I want to move all of this music to iTunes and clean up the songs prior to moving this data to "the Cloud." Plus, I really want to get rid of duplicates and bad info in addition to helping organize the music files by artist, album, etc. I'm not too worried about album artwork, at least for now.

The local Apple store told me I can "drag" the songs into iTunes but from there I have read so much info that I am lost. What is the best way to "clean" the data before moving it to "the Cloud?"

Thanks...

Click to expand...

I'm currently converting my entire library to itunes file format and the one thing I can tell you is to not drag ALL of your music at once. I'm currently going album by album and taking it from there. It's actually pretty entertaining but I've always enjoyed having my stuff exactly the way I like it.

I'm intrigued by this Tagalicious app though. I may give it a whirl and see how i like it.

I would also recommend albumartexchange.com for high quality artwork as that's what I've been using. They mostly have album art in 600 x 600 ratio which is perfect for itunes.

wimberlyutk said:

...The local Apple store told me I can "drag" the songs into iTunes but from there I have read so much info that I am lost. What is the best way to "clean" the data before moving it to "the Cloud?"

Thanks...

Click to expand...

I'm confused about what might be meant by "clean". Are we talking sound quality? Metadata?

Regardless, I think what might work is iTunes Match, which is $25 bucks a year. It will take old MP3s down to about 64 kbps quality, and actually will physically replace them in your iCloud account with 256 kbps AACs mastered from CDs, That will fix any sound issues. You can also have iTunes replace the metadata so that you have the right titles, cover art, etc. You can then not reup with iTunes Match (let it expire at the end of the year) and you still get to keep the high-quality copies.

Once Apple gets "Mastered for iTunes" rolling, which is an effort to get the original master tapes from commercial music houses so that even better 256 kbps copies can be made, this will be an even more attractive option (A 256 compressed version made from a commercial CD will not be as good as a 256 version mastered from the higher-quality originals).

But it is a double-edged sword. I can not get my entire current library onto a 16 GB iPod. If I use iTunes Match then the library will grow to about 21 GB, which means I will have to start looking at an iPod Touch. So while the $25 cost to automatically up the quality of my files, many of them originally ripped in 2001 as 128 k, is enticing, to get that benefit all the way to a portable device might end up costing me another $300.

You also need a good internet connection to replace a large library. My understanding is that you might not have to actually upload the originals as iTunes Match can look into your library on your computer and see what songs it needs to match, but in my case we are still talking 21 GB of downloads from them. There is also a 25,000 title limit.

wimberlyutk said:

I have a number of songs that are duplicates, many lack data such as albums, etc. Some have wrong artists (mostly in the form of listing multiple "feature" artists as main artists, etc.).

Click to expand...

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes is a great resource for managing your iTunes tags and files.

Here are a few scripts that I've found particularly useful:
For duplicates, you may want to check out Dupin.

However, there are reasons why you may want to keep some duplicates. iTunes considers items duplicates if the song name and artist fields match. They may be from different albums, have different lengths or bitrates, be different file types, be live or studio versions, etc. There is no software that can make all those determinations for you. The safest method of dupe deletion is manual. With any other method, you run the risk of deleting something you didn't intend to delete.

benh911f said:

I have used both TuneUp and Tagalicious, and prefer Tagalicious. If you go with Tagalicious, I would recommend getting the version right from the website (thelittleappfactory.com) as opposed to the Mac App Store because the version on the MAS doesn't let you search for and insert lyrics for the songs. I still did a lot of manual tweaking of the metadata after the fact, but that's because I'm extremely anal about the metadata, so YMMV.

Click to expand...

This. Tagalicious isn't perfect but does a good job and it's cheap. As ben said, don't buy the mac app store version though

Are there any programs out there for Windows 7 users to clean up an iTunes library? (correct song titles and albums)

Also, I have iTunes Match and keep getting "an unknown error (4010)" when trying to add to icloud. These are songs I downloaded off the internet years ago.