iTunes TuneUp

Looking for and manually tagging album art is a huge pain. I'll be checking this one out.

Works as advertised.

P

I gave it a go, although I didn't/don't use it all that much. I actually found it to be a bit hit and miss with some covers, and it also has an irritating habit of splitting albums into multiple parts.

A word of caution: if you pay through paypal, be aware that you might well be signing up to an automatically recurring yearly payment (which you need to manually cancel through paypal). Be sure to cancel it unless you want to be paying full price for it, every year (without so much as an email to ask if you would like to renew).

I own this program, and have been using it for a while

I bought it after trying every free methed i could find and finding them all tedious annoying and crappy.

I feel this one is the best and im glad i got it, it saved me tons of time

Yes, its not perfect as ST3ve said, but the things he mentioned always give you a choice as whether to keep what it suggests or not, so it never just screws things up without asking.

I have nearly 500 albums, many of them kind of obscure, and in the end i think it only had real issues with like 2 or 3...

I definatley would recommend it.

However... crap i just noticed that you said youre not using itunes... here is what i did in that regard ( i also use foobar )

I ran tuneup until i was satisfied with everything
then, i went through itunes and made sure everything was categorized the way i like it - for example, sometimes tagging involves taking a single album, and giving it all kinds of different artist names, which then makes it a pain in my ass when i go to sort it, so in those cases i modded things to make it clean and neat and easily identifiable by artist and album

Then, i backed up my entire collection just in case, and I turned on the itunes function that sorts your collection automatically based on the itunes tags.

once i was sure it didnt completely destroy my folder structure, i set foobar to sort by folder structure

I did this because i could then divide my music into as many categories (genre or otherwise) as i wanted, by simply lumping them into folders (whic is also easily undoable if you change your mind later) and i would have a neat collection...

sounds like a lot of work, but isnt that bad when you use tuneup first

OK, say you're a fb2k user. Let's assume either FLAC or MP3. You should have gotton the basic metadata tags inserted in to the files when you ripped. But if not, if the files are named right, fb2k will insert the metadata in the tags in one easy "guess from filename" operation. You can also use fb2k to go to freedb like shoulda happened when you ripped.

But now let's turn to album art. I like art right in the FLAC, not in a separate file. fb2k will display album art just fine, but is no help finding it and inserting it.

Try:

MuvUnder Cover: The Album Art Sleuth - Finds Album Cover Artwork Automatically | MuvEnum Software

It is not free, but worth every penny. Finding art is a breeze, and if you don't like the initial set of selections, choose the "deeper search" and you find the right art nearly 100% of the time. Insertion in to the FLAC file is automatic.

You can do dozens of albums in one quick session -- the UI is a snap. Documentation and Support are phenomenal!

Try this on 25 albums free first - you will buy!

Do you need something that will identify and correct artist names and album names and track names as well? Or do you just need something that can find cover art?

What types of files are you working with? ALAC, FLAC, MP3, AAC?
Some tools work with some of the file types but not all.

What do you consider minimal quality for the album art? 200x200? 300x300? 500x500? Are you particular about image quality?

One tool you can try for album art is Album Art Downloader. It is free. It searches for album art in several online album art sources (including buy.com and amazon and google). Album art quality is a mixed bag. It can load your Foobar library and cooperate with Foobar.

J River Media Jukebox can search J River's YADB database for artwork based on artist name and album name. It can also take a guess at artist, album, and track names based on audio fingerprints to tag files that are missing tags. The fingerprinting is very hit and miss. Depends on what's in their database and how well the fingerprints match. Jukebox is free. It will work with FLAC and MP3 and WMA. It will not work with ALAC or AAC.

MusicBrainz Picard is also an option. It can attempt to correct artist and album tags based on audio fingerprinting. It doesn't do album art. It is free.

media monkey also does a fairly good job of tagging (the auto tag) but it can also tag from a playlist or file name it's not perfect but does a good job for me and you can also set it up to monitor new files being added

Pollux

Pollux | Music Organization Meets Automation | Home

what a nice plugin for iTunes...sadly it is not a freeware

Have you used it? What is the quality of the album art? The web page says they use AllCdCovers as a source for album art. AllCdCovers has poor quality covers. User contributions of scans that they can't be bothered to edit to make presentable. So you end up with some big images like 1023x1408 of a raw scan that has been barely edited then JPG compressed down to 150kb so it now has artifacts making it even more difficult to edit if you wanted to take the time to make something presentable.

If you're used to or expecting the album art quality that you get from iTunes you're going to be disappointed in AllCdCovers.

I hope they have another source of cover art in addition to AllCdCovers.

iTunes actually has fairly good and consistent album art. Most of it is a consistent 600x600. Most of it seems to be images that are supplied by the labels rather than obvious scans. However, they do over-compress the images so they have jpg artifacts.

(disclaimer: I'm a bit of a cover art snob, I like good cover art)

If I want to create playlists based strictly on sample rates, is there something out there that will allow "instant gratification", rather than working through lists sorted by sample rate. I know I am being lazy :-)

Just create a smart playlist in iTunes and set the Bit Rate filter option to "greater than" something like 325.

I do pay and use Pollux, but I don't really care about album art.

But you are correct with your assessment that AllCdCovers isn't by any stretch a premiere CD Cover archive. You do however, have the option to use Last.fm as your source for metadata and album artwork.

Thank you!