Too many songs, too many albums, and too much chaos: that’s the state of your iTunes library. It’s time to straighten things out and get your tunes in order. we’ve found an incredible solution for you that will organize your library with one click.
With this plug-in you can clean up duplicates, add the year of release to albums, group similar names together, and more.
If you use iTunes to organize music on your computer, you’ve likely hit a wall at some point with your large library of songs. There may be so many songs in the iTunes library that it’s impossible to find what you’re looking for.
This is where iRefine comes into play. With this fantastic plug-in, you can easily organize all of your songs into different sections by artist, album, genre, etc., making it much easier to find specific tracks later on.
You can also quickly create playlists based on genres and artists in a matter of minutes by using the search bar in the center of the dashboard.
The best part is it all happens automatically so there’s no need to waste hours on tediously tagging music! Afrohi Storama has some more information on how to organize your iTunes library using this incredible plug-in.
This nifty program will take care of everything for you so it looks terrific at a glance. And this tool is free thanks to one of our favorite music blogs, NowSourcing!
A Brief Overview
The name of the program is TuneUp. It’s free, it’s easy to set up, and it works in both PC and Mac environments. The best thing about TuneUp is that you can use it across your entire computer system. So by cleaning up your iTunes library you’re also solving your Windows jumbled music folder miseries!
TuneUp will clean up album art, organize titles by artist or album title, remove duplicate songs, and get rid of all those incorrect song tags.
It’s a great way to quickly get your music files into tip-top shape without taking hours or even days. And because this tool is so easy to use, you don’t have to be a computer wizard to get great results.
How to Clean Up Your iTunes Library
TuneUp will require the installation of a program on your computer. But you’ll definitely want it once you see what it can do for your digital music collection. Here’s what you’ll need:
TuneUp program (free!) (link at bottom of page) iTunes (comes with your iPhone or iPod, but you’ll want the most recent version available) Free hard drive space (approximately 1GB) some time and patience!
To get started, download and install TuneUp by double-clicking the installer and following the on-screen instructions. Don’t worry about installing Tuneup, we’ll tell you how to do that in a moment. First, let’s see how TileUp works:
1. Right-click on the TuneUp icon in your system tray
Not much happening here? Don’t worry — we’ll show you what to do next. Click on the right mouse button on any one of your songs and you’ll get a menu from which you can organize songs by artist, album title or tag (which is cleverly called LastFM tags). You can also add album artwork to your library for free.
2. The main screen will list your music files in alphabetical order.
To organize them by genre, you’ll need to drag and drop one of the files to the “Group:” box. You can also drag and drop an album or artist title to group music by that album or artist.
3. To remove duplicates for certain songs.
You’ll drag and drop them into the “Remove Duplicates” box. There’s also an option called Auto-Tagging which will scan your library looking for duplicate files (similar ones will be grouped together).
When it finds them, they’ll be removed along with any incorrect song tags. Once you’ve finished, click “Make Recommendations” to have TuneUp find similar songs for you automatically.
4. Organizing your music files by album cover is a snap.
Just drop an album or artist title into the “Albums” box and TuneUp will group everything together for you and add album artwork to your iTunes library (if available).
5. Another great feature is the year-of-release information for albums.
To set this up (and that’s really all there is to it) click on “Settings > Other Settings > Year” and then type in the year of release for each album. Save your settings by clicking “Save Settings.” And you’re done!
6. One last thing before you go
Don’t forget to uninstall TuneUp (if you want) because, after all, it IS a plug-in. To uninstall TuneUp, right click on the TuneUp icon in your system tray and select Uninstall TuneUp.
This will give you a list of any other programs that TuneUp relies on to work. You’ll need to go into your Add/Remove Programs folder and uninstall them manually. Don’t forget to restart your computer before installing other programs.