Tidysongs

so i'm fortunate enough to have a roommate who messes up my ipod library (sarcasm implied). that being the case i wanted an easy way to clean and fix it.

tidysongs is a great idea, just turn it on, give it a task, and your music is all the way it should be. all too often, however, great ideas fall flat. this is one of those.

first thing i tried with it was to fix my songs. you have the choice of changing the level of what it will fix by increasing or decreasing the "confidence." for example, default is fix if 89% confidence or higher, meaning it's sure it's right.

i left it on that setting, it wasn't. it removed songs from albums, and put them in other albums, changed genres of songs, and completely renamed songs to names of other songs (which presented my next problem).

i understand these are all things it's supposed to look for to fix, but they need to update their library so it's information is correct, even though a lot of the incorrect information was for older albums. all that considered, it just made more work for me, instead of less.

the next thing i tried to do, was have it locate my duplicates (some of which weren't duplicates, just misnamed songs from the previous step). i will say that it does a better job of finding the duplicates than itunes itself. however, once it finds them, there are only two options, delete on site, or add "duplicate" to there name. i chose the second, because i prefer to here the songs just in case. it deleted one regardless of what i said, but named the rest duplicate.

this part of the program would be okay, if you could manage the songs from the program itself, rather than going back to itunes, finding all the duplicates, and the supposed originals, comparing them, and making the changes. i can do that just fine without waiting for tidysongs to tell me very little i couldn't find myself.

all in all, this program is not worth the time or money. as i said, it's a great idea, but it is very poorly executed. if they fix the information in there library, so it actually fixes the information on your own, and improve the interface between itunes and tidysongs, it might be worth it. but as for now, don't bother.