December 13th, 2008

Tuneup Companion 1.0 for iTunes, should you install?

Lots of reviewers post news about exciting new apps, singing them praises, but I guess that is fine if they’ve actually used the app themselves.

I came across one app recently, named TuneUp, that automatically cleans your iTunes Library, finds missing album arts for all your tracks, displays YouTube videos of the track that you’re currently listening to, and lets you know if the artist is playing a concert near you. This app is available for both Mac & PC users, $11.95/Year or $19.95/Forever.

Now playing displays information about your now-playing-tracks:

How TuneUp cleans your library is by sampling all your un-titled tracks with their database of tracks and automatically name your un-titled tracks to the matching ones. I’ve tested this feature and it works perfectly.

Drop files here to clean up your naming, tagging mess, works:

But what really drawn me into this app is finding all my missing album arts and updating them all at one go. During the trial period, I was only able to update 50 album arts after which I receive a prompt to buy the app for $19.95. Well I did, paid for the app, only to find that the app is not capable of fetching more than 50 albums. What? My cursor turns into a beach ball spinning in an infinite loop and loading bars rolling forever, trying to find album art for my artists.

Fetching album arts for your tracks, always hangs:

When I re-started the app, the app keeps telling me they can’t connect to their server. The error prompt tells me to check my internet connection (perfect at that time) insinuating that the fault lies with my internet connection. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the error prompt tells me that their server is overloaded instead of pushing the blame to it’s users, who paid for the app.

Occasionally, the app will crash.

No one likes seeing this I guess:

Fortunately the developer identified the problems and refunded me immediately:

TuneUp is a promising app nevetheless, I would love to have it as a companion for my iTunes but only after the problems are fixed. Otherwise we’ll all just be paying beta testers.

Should you install? Maybe the question is should you buy?



Mac Apps