Friedbeef’s Tech

Too many songs in iTunes not tagged properly

Two weeks ago, I had 8000+ songs, and most of it was quite a mess in iTunes.  Many of them had missing album names, and artist names.  Some had wrong track titles, and most did not have any album art.  Attempting a cleanup of that scale would take weeks of painstaking work, so I never really got around to it.  Today however, every single track is perfectly clean.

How to clean it up fast

The TuneUp iTunes plug-in is perhaps the single, easiest way to clean up all the patchy information in your iTunes.  All I did was to drag and drop songs into TuneUp, and that’s it.

How does it work?  Every piece of music whatever the source has a certain audio signature.  TuneUp will compare that signature with the online music database Gracenote, and retrieves all the information and album art about the song and puts it in iTunes.  Say goodbye to "Track 01". No more "Unknown Artist". No more "Notorious B.I.G" vs. "Biggie Smalls". No more "Beatles" vs. "The Beatles" and missing cover art in one smooth step.

I’ve tried other free solutions like ‘Musicbrainz’, but integration with music already added in iTunes is patchy, and it’s about 10 times harder to use.  TuneUp is without a doubt the best option for this job by a mile. 

Get a lifetime subscription for FREE

The free version of TuneUp will allow you to clean 500 songs at no cost.  They also offer a 1 year unlimited song cleanup subscription at USD11.95, and a lifetime subscription for USD19.95 (limited offer).

The good folks at TuneUp however have agreed to give away FIVE LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTIONS for FREE!  Now you can have clean tracks on your iTunes forever!

Contest entry steps:

1. Download, Install, and Register TuneUp
2. Send an email to friedbeef@tuneupmedia.com from the email address that you registered with, asking for a subscription.  Brownie points given to those who include something to make them laugh.
3. Sit back and cross your fingers.

The contest deadline is until 4th September - so enter now - even if you don’t win - you’ll at least get to clean up 500 songs for free :)

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If you’ve got a 3G enabled S60 Symbian phone (Nokia N-series & E-Series, Samsung i550 & G810) - It’s now possible to instantly transform it into a WiFi hotspot so you can hook up other devices to ride on your mobile 3G connection.

JoikuSpot Light is an awesome piece of freeware which allows you to do just that.  Simple to set up, and easy to use - It also comes with some great features like:

• Encryption support - WEP including 128bit key generator for your security
• Battery threshold - shuts down program when battery level is too low
• Multiple connections - so you can share your bandwidth with others

A premium edition is also available if you need added features.  While JoikuSpot Light supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols,  JoikuSpot Premium supports ALL protocols allowing user to use Outlook, YouTube, Web radios, FTP, VPNs, Skype and other programs requiring specific protocols.

Anyhow, you can do a lot more than hook up laptops to your phone’s 3G connection…

What I did for myself was to wirelessly hook up my iPod touch to my phone, so I’ve now got a device which gives me the Internet experience of an iPhone 3G… at 1/3 the price :)

How do you usually get your WiFi connection when you’re on the road?  Tell us in the comments!

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Need to populate a database with some dummy figures?  Here’s perhaps the fastest way you’ll be able to do this.

GenerateData.com is a free service which quickly generate large volumes of custom data in a variety of formats (eg. Excel, CSV, SQL, HTML).  What I like most about GenerateData.com it is you can choose the type of data to generate, for example - phone numbers, email, names etc.  Everything just gets neatly generated based on whatever you select and it really saves time trying to come up with quality dummy data.

Also, if you want this service to run on own server (in case you need to run some heavy duty data generation), the script is open and available for download on the site - for FREE.

Thanks Skeevs for sharing this :)

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