Best Music iTunes Content and Add-Ons
With over 13 million DRM-free songs available for purchase on iTunes, it can be hard to find the one you want. Fortunately, iTunes has tools to help you. You can have alerts about new music from your favorite artists sent to you. Simply click on your account name in the upper right corner of the screen, select Account, log into your account and click on the button labeled,“Manage My Alerts.” You can also receive an e-mail alert for Apple’s free “Single of the Week” as well as new and upcoming releases by subscribing to Apple’s “New Music Tuesday”newsletter.
iTunes automatically downloads the correct “Meta tags”(track titles, artists, genre, year,etc.) and artwork for the albums you buy, but if you filled your music library with songs you’ve ripped from your CD collection, you mayneed to update this information. Fortunately, there are a number ofsolutions that do that for you.
SongGenie 2 ($29.95) updates song information with ease by scanning your music library, identifying songs with missing tags, offering to add missing tags to tracks, and attempting to correct errors in tags (e.g., typos in artist or song names, incorrect year information, etc.). SongGenie 2 also downloads lyrics, which can be displayed when playing music on your iPhone and most iPods. You cantoggle the display of “Lyrics & Podcast Info” in the iPod section of Settings.
CoverScout ($39.95, Mac only) finds high resolution cover graphics for your CDs, allows you to edit them in an iPhoto-like interface, and then applies them to the albums in your collection. CoverScout can also apply the cover graphic to each track in the album so you won’t lose the graphic if you move the files. (I love thislast feature.)
Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes (free, Mac only) is a collection of over 450 Macintosh scripts (i.e., mini-programs) that solve particular problems or add functionality to iTunes. My favoriteis the “Super Remove Dead Tracks” script, which identifies all the missing tracks in your library (indicated by the gray exclamation point) and removes them.
I am primarily a Mac user and not as familiar with iTunes helper programs for the Windows environment. There are fewer quality titles for Windows, and I usually don’t like the crossplatform solutions. However, there is one that I can heartily recommend.
TuneUp ($19.95 Annual version, $29.95 Gold version, PCand Mac) runs in a window alongside iTunes. The Clean Tab works like SongGenie, finding unknown tracks and fixing any metadata problems. The Cover Arttab finds missing cover graphics and downloads it. The Tuniverse tab displays a wealth of information about the currently artist, CD, and track, including videos, links to artist bios, news and merchandise, concert notifications, album and song recommendations,and more. The Concerts tab scans your artist list and provides chronological and calendar views of upcoming concerts in your area. It even lists venue and ticket prices with direct links to purchase tickets. The Share tab lets you communicate your most played songs, top artists, favorite albums and so on to avariety of social networking sites. If TuneUp adds lyric discovery/download, it will be the only iTunes helper program you need.
With over 13 million DRM-free songs available for purchase on iTunes, it can be hard to find the one you want. Fortunately, iTunes has tools to help you. You can have alerts about new music from your favorite artists sent to you. Simply click on your account name in the upper right corner of the screen, select Account, log into your account and click on the button labeled,“Manage My Alerts.” You can also receive an e-mail alert for Apple’s free “Single of the Week” as well as new and upcoming releases by subscribing to Apple’s “New Music Tuesday”newsletter.
iTunes automatically downloads the correct “Meta tags”(track titles, artists, genre, year,etc.) and artwork for the albums you buy, but if you filled your music library with songs you’ve ripped from your CD collection, you mayneed to update this information. Fortunately, there are a number ofsolutions that do that for you.
SongGenie 2 ($29.95) updates song information with ease by scanning your music library, identifying songs with missing tags, offering to add missing tags to tracks, and attempting to correct errors in tags (e.g., typos in artist or song names, incorrect year information, etc.). SongGenie 2 also downloads lyrics, which can be displayed when playing music on your iPhone and most iPods. You cantoggle the display of “Lyrics & Podcast Info” in the iPod section of Settings.
CoverScout ($39.95, Mac only) finds high resolution cover graphics for your CDs, allows you to edit them in an iPhoto-like interface, and then applies them to the albums in your collection. CoverScout can also apply the cover graphic to each track in the album so you won’t lose the graphic if you move the files. (I love thislast feature.)
Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes (free, Mac only) is a collection of over 450 Macintosh scripts (i.e., mini-programs) that solve particular problems or add functionality to iTunes. My favoriteis the “Super Remove Dead Tracks” script, which identifies all the missing tracks in your library (indicated by the gray exclamation point) and removes them.
I am primarily a Mac user and not as familiar with iTunes helper programs for the Windows environment. There are fewer quality titles for Windows, and I usually don’t like the crossplatform solutions. However, there is one that I can heartily recommend.
TuneUp ($19.95 Annual version, $29.95 Gold version, PCand Mac) runs in a window alongside iTunes. The Clean Tab works like SongGenie, finding unknown tracks and fixing any metadata problems. The Cover Arttab finds missing cover graphics and downloads it. The Tuniverse tab displays a wealth of information about the currently artist, CD, and track, including videos, links to artist bios, news and merchandise, concert notifications, album and song recommendations,and more. The Concerts tab scans your artist list and provides chronological and calendar views of upcoming concerts in your area. It even lists venue and ticket prices with direct links to purchase tickets. The Share tab lets you communicate your most played songs, top artists, favorite albums and so on to avariety of social networking sites. If TuneUp adds lyric discovery/download, it will be the only iTunes helper program you need.
