Mac Monday: FixTunes – An Exorcism for Your iTunes
Jun 8th, 2009 by Ealeal
Being the obsessive type, a large portion of my teen years was dedicated to cataloging, organizing, arranging and re-arranging my vast music collection. These were the days of CDs, and my walls were like a jewel-case museum. What?! Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power sitting shamelessly next to Gang of Four’s Songs of the Free? Not on my watch, buddy! I was like a rabid watchdog, constantly weeding through obscure sub-genres and alphabetic hierarchy, making sure that certain ends of the music world shall always remain parallel lines, never meeting on my shelves or rubbing up against each other in CD cases.
When The Cult of iPod took the world by storm in late 2001, suddenly all of my extreme and tedious efforts were rendered useless – the world’s population had made the migration to individual MP3s, and music libraries left at the mercy of the shuffle. The secret to surviving this brave new world, once you get past your jewel case inhibitions? Smart tags, with which you could easily look up and find music in your collection – no matter how deep you buried it, easily create playlists according to genre, artist, album, year or just about anything else. And how could we forget the glorious vanity of skimming through your iTunes albums’ artwork?
However, people don’t walk around toting baskets filled with goodies, and life ain’t exactly a picnic – sometimes, even tags are missing in action when you desperately need them. Sure, you could – in theory – spend hours or possibly days manually fixing all those missing tags in your iTunes stash, but come on, this is the 21st century we’re in. Enter FixTunes, and you’ve got yourself a sweet little solution that mostly does the job.
FixTunes is completely automated, meaning you don’t need to overwork your fingers by typing, and is quite flexible, allowing you to either go song by song and approve the new information it locates for your tracks and albums, or to just sit back and let the magic happen. Of course, nothing’s perfect – this will become clear when you try to look up information for covers or remixes of original tracks, or bands who are pretty much doomed to obscurity, but all in all, this is a sweet deal. To work some Mary Poppins magic on your iTunes collection, just check out this handy video tutorial from VitaminCM.com:
Go forth an catalog your tunes, kids! Got Mac tips or playlist suggestions? Drop us a line via email or comment on this post.
