Now Mac users can “clean” songs with TuneUp

Venture Beat — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:18:11 -0500

TuneUp, the iTunes plugin that cleans up your music tracks by supplying the correct song information and art, is now available for Mac.

It’s a pretty cool idea — by taking a song’s “audio fingerprint,” TuneUp can fill in any missing or incorrect information, as well as provide the cover art. After installation, all users have to do is drag problematic songs into the TuneUp sidebar that appears in iTunes.

This would have been much more useful for me when I was still transferring songs from my CD collection; I had to do a lot of typing to fill-in “Track 1″s and “Unknown Artist”s. Now, however, I buy all my music online, so this isn’t really a problem. Still, it was great to add cover art to many of my old MP3s with the click of a button. TuneUp also displays local concert listings for the musicians in your collection.

When the service launched in July, we complained that Mac users had to to be patient, so it’s good to see the wait is over. TuneUp says it has already cleaned up 25 million songs. I’m still wondering about the San Francisco startup’s business model, however. There’s a free version that will clean up to 500 tracks and supply up to 50 cover images, then you have to pay either a $19.95 one-time fee or an $11.95 subscription. Is this useful enough that people will hand over even a relatively small amount of cash for it? I’m not completely convinced.

Also: Is there something in the air motivating PC-only services to launch their Mac versions this week?

Update: A competitor called FixTunes is offering a discount to VentureBeat readers in the comments below.