If you've 'collected' digital audio from the old Napster days, we'd safely say that you probably have a rather extensive audio collection, with most tracks lacking the right information, artwork and other elements that you want for a successful catalogue. The snag is, if you have thousands of tracks, updating them isn't an easy task. Ideally you'd find a companion tool that would reside alongside your existing iTunes library and enable you to update tracks en-masse.

TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 is such a tool. It enables you to check your tracks and search for and then update your artwork. You can fix track information on the fly and much more. However, there are two big problems - firstly if you store your iTunes audio on another computer (such as a media server), then you can't use it to fix or manage your tracks. Secondly, one of the key features is to search for and update the artwork on your tracks, but in our test, out of the 50 tracks where artwork was clearly missing...it could only find artwork for one of these tracks. These 50 tracks were all sourced from iTunes or imported via audio CDs a few years ago. Old they may be, but a tool such as TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 - designed to fix these issues - should be able to do what it says on the tin.

The other issue we have is that it will only clean a small number of tracks before you have to pay a subscription fee.

TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 link.

26 Sep 2008