How To Organize Your iTunes Collection With TidySongs
Do you download music from multiple sources? How about sources you don’t pay for? Even if all you’re doing is ripping CD’s onto your hard drive, odds are good you’ve got more than a few songs labeled something like “Track 06.mp3” or “This song’s totally sweet.mp3”.
How in the world are you supposed to remember what song that really is? And how are you supposed to figure out when you’ve got duplicate songs taking up space on your computer?
The answer to both those questions is one word (well, really two, but one in a Web 2.0 kind of way) – TidySongs.
TidySongs is a brand-new Adobe AIR app, for Windows and Mac OS X, that hooks into your iTunes and goes bananas all over your music library, helping you to finally organize your iTunes collection.
Before I go any further, a disclaimer: TidySongs isn’t free. It’s got a fully-functioning free trial, that’s perfect for a one-time cleanup of your songs. The Genre Renaming feature remains free, but to continue to use the rest costs $30. It’s a bit hefty, but I found the benefit of one use well worth the time to install. If you download like crazy, you might want to consider purchasing the app.
Once you’ve installed the app (it’s small, and requires Adobe AIR – which it will automatically install if you don’t have it already), open up iTunes and TidySongs. You’ll immediately get three options: Fix Your Songs, Find Duplicates, and Organize Genres.
Let’s start with the big kahuna first: Fix Your Songs. Select a playlist (If you pick ‘Music‘, TidySongs scans your whole library), and check a couple of options before you start. I recommend, at least for the first pass, making sure “Fix Songs Manually” is selected – that means you review every change TidySongs makes before it makes them.
A nice medium, though, and one that worked for me, was to select “Automatically fix songs if confidence is greater than 80%.” Every time TidySongs fixes a song, it gives a confidence level of how sure it is that it’s making the right change – my experience was that, when it’s over 80%, it’s actually right about 99% of the time. Once your options are set, click “Fix Songs” and let TidySongs go to work!
TidySongs brings up the list of all the songs it wants to update for you, with all the info (it finds album art, track #, genre, and so much more) in the window. You either choose “Skip” or “Fix,” and TidySongs takes its action, and moves you to the next one. Once it’s finished, you’ll find you’ve got tons of new album artwork, better organization and ordering of albums, and a much more information-packed iTunes. This is a good first step in organizing your entire iTunes collection.
Your next option is “Find Duplicates.” TidySongs checks the Name, Artist, and/or Album of the track to see if you’ve already got it – if so, it keeps either the longer one or the better quality one, and can either delete the duplicate or just mark it as a duplicate.
You can’t actually delete anything from TidySongs without paying, but that wasn’t a problem: the "Simulate" option worked fine, and manually deleting duplicates was super easy. In one pass of my library, TidySongs found no fewer than 225 duplicates (out of 8,000 songs, not so bad, but still). Of those, I ended up deleting about 200. That’s a great percentage, but I’d still recommend checking TidySongs’ findings. Once you run this, though, you might be surprised how much space it frees on your computer.
Organizing Genres is a more simple affair – it presents you with a list of all the genres you have in your iTunes library. Select one or more, and choose what you want to rename it to. This lets you consolidate your genres into a smaller number, based on a system you’ve devised, rather than the insanity that makes Pop Rock, Rock/Pop, and rock_pop three different genres.
As a serial music downloader, having TidySongs around to run once a week or so is a lifesaver – no manually hunting for album artwork, or renaming songs – TidySongs does it for you. Even incorrectly named songs get found, for the most part, and are updated properly. It’s an impressive app, and has kept the audio-OCDer in me happy.
iTunes users should also grab a free copy of our The Ultimate iTunes Manual. Lots of great tips there.
How do you keep your music organized?
Photo Credit : Mikey
(By) David Pierce is a college student, freelance writer, and general lover of everything Web-based. His own blog, about thriving in a digital world, is The 2.0 Life.
David, Thank you for the writing this review on TidySongs to let your readers know about us! I like your description “goes bananas all over your music library to finally help you organize your iTunes.”
Let me know if there is any way we can help you get your music fixed. Email me at kelly [at] tidysongs [dot] com with any questions or feedback.
Not sure what kind of market there is out there for software you might hope to run once every couple of weeks and months. Especially when there are free alternatives out there.
what free alternates are available?
@bob, TidySongs helps fix your songs so that your music collection looks the way you would like. Some people are very particular about the way they want their songs to be displayed and have the appropriate song information and art for each song. These are the users that will benefit from TidySongs and are the reason we created the program to help you fix your songs.
Yeah i get that. I’m not trying to rag on your software, it works very well. But personally, i wouldn’t have much use for it, i keep my music well organised.
Run it once.
Stopped after 88 songs and asked for money…
So it appears that this soft is not “a one-time cleanup of your songs” but more like a demo for 88 songs. If I had a 88 songs library I wouldn’t need to run this
Please do not deceive your readers.
VVVlad, i figured as much, thanks for saving me the downloaD.
Really? WEIRD. I went through 4500 songs, cleaned it fine. I never got the “give us money now!” thing, actually – maybe something weird happened there. I’m so sorry if that happens to others!
Ugh – downloaded, installed, got 88 songs deep and it asked for the credit card. Does anyone know of a legit free version of this (don’t care about album art)?
same problem… ran through 115 of 4000 songs and then asked for money.
I created a discount code for your users to make TidySongs 50% off for the first 25 users who purchase it. Enter the discount code: “MakeUse” to receive 50% off your purchase.
@vvvlad, you have to purchase TidySongs to update all your music. The free version does allow you to organize you genres.
@lawl and @stork, you can organize your genres with the trial. Enter the discount code “MakeUse” to receive 50% off your purchase.
So, anyone knows alternative programs to this one? I’ve been looking for this kind of thing for a while
I bought this product because my library got corrupted and i’ve been rebuilding it from a number of sources. with over 100gigs, its too much to load all those album art pictures manually
I have to say, i’m really really disappointed with this product. It recognizes virtually none of my dance music. It only had one bob marley album in its files (no – i don’t want the effing best of bob marley album art on every marley tune!!!!!! i want the correct albums, the correct artist, the correct art, the correct remix)
I feel like a tool for wasting my money on this software. Until they have a proper database adn proper technology for working out which song is which, you’d do better buying scratchcards
m
I have been using a program like this for quite some time, TuneUp, and have been really satisfied with it. It works fast and efficiently. I haven’t tried this program, but if you have a large quantity of music and need to get it organized, if you’re looking for a program to make it easy I highly recommend tuneUp due to my experience with it.
How do you get a rip of the tuneit reg?
@max, if you could send me an email at kelly [at] tidysongs [dot] com that would be great so that we can look into your issue further. The weird part about your description is that TidySongs does search for original album information. First TidySongs will search for the song details, if a high confidence match is not found…then it will search for compilation/best of albums.
Kelly it appears that no body on here really rates your product. I like tuneup myself anyone know of any other good programs.
Man… I new this article was to good to be true.
Musicbrainz Picard is similar to this, and free. Not as intuitive, but it does the job.
tried to insall this but after the step where i click the .exe file on my desktop i get an error message that says “critical error finding target executable” i get the same message when clicking the same file located in the Program files directory. meh…wont bother tryin to figure it out as all these comments arnt that great and i dont plan on spendin any moneys on it
I purchased the product. It’s amazing at what it does. Though it does it with some major bugs as of the moment:
1. It stops at some songs and never finishes the fixing. I was never able to figure out why. I emailed the company using the “Report Problem” link in the app but never got a response. Till this moment I couldn’t get it to finish my entire 40GB+ collection.
2. The duplicate remover feature doesn’t seem to work. It did identify duplicate songs and I told it to append the word “DUPLICATE” to the name but i couldn’t find any song with that word. Weird.
Anyways, I still believe in the potential of this product. I’ve tried many so called song fixing apps but all of them required manual labor. This is the only 1 that does all that automatically. Once the people behind it get around to fixing all major bugs and release an updated version with better UI, I think it’s well worth the purchase.
Aleaddin – Thanks for the comment! Both the issues you mentioned were fixed in the latest version we posted on Friday: Version 1.559. It’s a free download at http://www.tidysongs.com/download
The problem was due to “missing songs” in your iTunes library (songs that iTunes can’t find on your computer). This usually happens when you move song files around in folders on your computer rather than moving them inside iTunes.
Anyway, try out the new version. If you are still having issues, feel free to email me at daniel@tidysongs.com and I’d be happy to help you out. Thanks!
Thank you Daniel @ TidySongs, that really fixed the stopping issue. I got my entire collection fixed. Lovely!
Hi,
I bought tidy tunes, and I haven’t had much luck. It is telling me there are zero duplicates today. I’m looking at i-Tunes, some have as many as four duplicates. With each one, I looked via Windows explorer, and sure enough there are indeed four songs from the same album.
Before, when it did flag duplicates it didn’t remove them. I think this program needs more work. I’m ending up with just a big mess. When I wrote to you personally, I told you about the “it flagging duplicates but not removing them” you replied that a few other people had said the same thing.
But I didn’t feel like I had any idea when or if this would be fixed. I appreciate the 50% discount, but I am using 0% of it. May I have a refund? Thanks. Randal S.
Hi Guys
I’m struggling to get my music sorted with TidySongs. It is recognising the duplicates but not removing them from itunes…aaarrrgh. I’m getting really frustrated!
@Joseph there are 2 ways to separate the duplicates. Either select the option to remove them from iTunes in TidySongs, or to add the word duplicate to the songs that are duplicates and this way you can choose which songs are removed.
Kelly; there are a load of comments about complications with the installation and general operation/behavior of your software…! Have you already addressed these situations? I’m pretty much SOLD about your product; however I’m hesitating due to the load of complaints.
I’m having a really frustrating experience with Tidysongs. I downloaded and installed it. First off, I wasn’t crazy about the multi-step installation process (e.g. To Finish Installation, Double-click TidySongs Setup on your Desktop
THEN, follow the directions to finish installation).
Next I tried the automatic album artwork option using the defaults. After processing a few songs, it displayed “Oops, lost connection with iTunes…”. Huh? My iTunes was just sitting idle in the background.
So I closed Tidysongs annd relaunched it (from the Todysongs desktop shortcut). Even though it was already installed, it popped up:
To Finish Installation…
Double-click TidySongs Setup on your Desktop
THEN… follow the directions to finish installation.
So I double-clicked Tidysongs Setup and then got this error:
—————————
TidySongs Setup Setup
—————————
Error opening file for writing:
C:\Program Files\TidySongs\AirHelper.exe
Click Abort to stop the installation,
Retry to try again, or
Ignore to skip this file.
—————————
Abort Retry Ignore
—————————
So I went to uninstall it (from control panel, add/remove programs) and saw that there are 2 installations – the first called Tidysongs, the second called Tidysongs (remove only). Why is there 2 entries and which one do I uninstall first?
Wholy frustrating Batman! I don’t think this program is very polished.
-Al
@ Al
I’m sorry that you’re frustrated, but this would be more helpful in an email to us at TidySongs so that we can get TidySongs fixing your songs as soon as possible.
We don’t want the installation process to be complicated so if you have suggestions, we always welcome user feedback. Right now, TidySongs requires adobe air and iTunes. Install the latest version of the 2 and you’ll be set to begin the fixing process.
Hi Kelly. Thanks for responding. Just to let you know, I am using the lastest version of iTunes and Tidysongs and I did email my issues using Tidysong’s “Report Problem” feature. But, as other users have also reported, I received no response or acknowledgment. You may want address this issue first.
Regarding installation, I would suggest a standalone single-step installer and unintaller.
Finally, the issue of losing communication with iTunes really needs to be address ASAP. This is a known problem that seems to have made it’s way from your previous Fixtunes product. Perhaps a problem with reusing older code? I’ve not had communication problems with other iTunes add-on products (e.g. meta-ipod, dupe-eliminator, tuneup companion) so you may want to research their communication methods.
-Al
I have been having problems with TidySongs. It runs through my library and says it is fixing each one, but none of the changes actually occur on my iTunes! Can anyone help?
Looks promising but…
The program run fine, but all my files are skipped.
I tried to reduce the number of files, Tried with just one mp3 and still nothing.
I using the latest version of all the programs (Air, itunes and Tidysongs of course)
:/
the same that ced happens to me, all my files are skipped… what can I do now?
As with Haley I am also having problems with TidySongs. It runs through my library and says it is fixing each one, but none of the changes actually occur on my iTunes! Can anyone help? This is extremely frustrating and will be requesting a refund if cannot be resolved.
Okay…I am annoyed as well. The program appears to work. However, it cannot stay connected to Itunes for more than a few songs. Sort of defeats the purpose. What is worse, as the above people mention…although it appears to be changing/fixing your files….IT IS NOT CHANGING ANYTHING!!!! A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY. I will be demanding a refund or a fix!
Looks like I should have checkd here first ! Just spent $30 on a product that does nothing ! Has anyone maaged to get this to work de-duping their itunes??
Feck !