Having recently gathered more than 100GB of music from all of my computers into a single drive, I’m faced with the cleaning of more than five thousand songs with generic filenames such as “Track1.mp3” and some even left untagged which is even worse. The process of singlehandedly looking up and tagging can take months.

Just so you know how it goes:

1. Look up album on Amazon or do a web search.

2. Find an exact match for my copy of the song.

3. Copy/write song info into ID3 tag, including album art.

One song might take two to three minutes, indie tracks might take longer.. that’s time I just don’t have!

A quick search gave me TidySongs……. simply… one of the most useful software I’ve ever ran into. Through your iTunes playlist, TidySongs looks up each song on Amazon’s music database and suggests details, furthermore, providing a “confidence” level of how close it matches your song against the recommendation.

Add album art – for example you might have a library that doesn’t need polishing but lacks album art, you can opt to do just that without modification of any other details.

Find duplicates – similar to iTune’s Show Duplicates feature but does more as it highlights the songs by appending “DUPLICATE” to the song name or you can set it to automatically remove the song from the iTunes playlist and move the file to the Desktop or a folder of your choice.

Fix your songs – crème de la crème; TidySongs goes through your whole playlist and sorts each song by comparing its existing tag to the Amazon database then recommending additional/changing details.

You might have misspelled songs or artists, missing details such as album name, genre or even track number, TidySongs fills that up!

Organize genres – I have VERY ODD genres in iTunes…. including “Mexico”, “Animal” and my favorite… “Evil”. This lets me rename “Evil” to “Goth”, “Death Metal”, any other existing genre or to a new name.

You have to love how powerful this little app is as it lets you specify which song details can be altered by Fix your songs. Also, the option to undo fixed songs is extremely handy because……

YES, AUTOMATIC! It can sort your music AUTOMATICALLY! If you’re having doubts about the quality of tagging (which it has as well, considering one’s music album can potentially contain eccentric songs)…….

TA-DA! A confidence level ranging from 50-95%. The confidence level is determined by how close a song’s details is against the online databases’. Usually a song which has a title and artist name exactly like the one in the database will have a confidence level of above 90%, so personally I always set it to 95% when auto-fixing so it never confuses songs.

(YES I HAVE THE THEME SONG TO POKEMON)

Personally, the only thing I didn’t like about TidySongs is its use of the Adobe Air runtime environment, understandable as it allows TidySongs to run on Windows and OS X… but from experience (TweetDeck uses over 150MB of RAM!), its such a memory hog. This is a minor annoyance to be honest, nothing that outshines the convenience for using it.

TidySongs makes use of Amazon’s music database, so as the database expands, so does TidySongs’ support of songs. Quality of details is of course, depending on whether the guy that was responsible for that entry had too much or too little time. Currently at 4M, it should cater to most if not all mainstream artists. Not bad, not bad at all!

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND TIDYSONGS, WHETHER YOU’RE A MUSIC LOVER OF 100 SONGS TO 100,000! Get it now, try it on 100 songs! www.tidysongs.com