Whether we like to admit it or not, we’ve all downloaded music at some point. Tags and album art don’t always match up the way we might like them to, and manually editing the file info is tiresome at best, and downright annoying at worst. Didn’t we invent computers so we could take mundane tasks out of our lives and do something a little more interesting?
I’m kind of cheating here a little because it’s an Air App, but I thought it was handy enough to pass it along to you.
Tidy Song literally tidies up your crappy media tags in the songs. Do you have a song by Sublime that’s labeled as Bob Marley? Everyone has one or two of those kicking around. Tidy Song fixes it. It also removes duplicate songs, fixes misspelled songs, fills in years and genre information, and adds missing album artwork. It’s beautiful.
August 19th, 2009 at 8:05 am
Thanks for letting your readers know about TidySongs, Joshua! I created a discount code for the first 25 users who purchase TidySongs. Use the discount code “macgasm” to get 50% off your purchase! Email me at kelly@tidysongs.com if you have any questions or feedback for us!
August 19th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Thanks, just passed along the info on twitter. :)
August 27th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
i use this app called tuneup, way better imo.
http://www.tuneupmedia.com is where i got it
April 4th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
http://www.tuneupmedia.com is Way better Todd. TidySongs fixed 300 out of 2000 of my songs, and that was after freezing up or crashing at least 20 times before that.
What a ridiculous piece of software.
September 27th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Tidysongs made a real mess of my music collection. Like adding Rolling Stones cover art to my Jackson Browne music files. Or adding the wrong artists or wrong song names to mp3 files. I’ve complained to Tidysongs many, many times, but don’t respond. I’ve finally had to demand that they return my money, and they STILL don’t respond. Lousy customer support – virtually nonexistent. And Tidysongs will screw up your music collection. These guys are a bunch of amateurs. They written a program not ready for prime time, but they need that prime time money. Thus, they’ve paid a lot of money to Google to bring them up at the top of the list for google searches. Someone should crack down on this scam. I paid $30 for a program that has trashed my music collection and no one wants to respond to my complaints – not even an email from technical support. I like to see someone crack down on these hustlers.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Jim, I ran my entire library through the application, and I found it to be very accurate.
April 4th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
False.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:47 am
DON”T BUY THIS PROGRAM!
May 31st, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Using windows 7, Tidysongs couldn’t even stay running for more than 10 songs in a row without crashing after I got the paid version and registered.
DO NOT BUY this program if you are on a PC. $30 down the drain.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:03 am
I paid $30 to keep getting a server error – don’t waste your money!
April 4th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
This program is crap-o-rama.
October 5th, 2009 at 6:12 am
Must admit I have only tried the free download of this, but although it sometimes has success it will often rename a track incorrectly. I don’t know what parameters it uses to identify songs but from what I’ve seen it has at best a 50% hit ratio. There is no way I would pay $30 dollars for the full program.
October 6th, 2009 at 6:21 am
@Jim please resend me an email at TidySongs. I answer all the customer support emails and we want to help our users get their songs fixed. I understand that TidySongs isn’t for everyone. We offer a trial period so that you can test out the program before you purchase and are very willing to work with any user that experiences a problem specific to their computer. We’re always interested in improving in any way we can and user feedback is very helpful!
@MacFan Please update to the most recent version from the website, we have corrected this problem.
@Mr. Buttershis TidySongs was built around several different databases of music and we constantly add to the library, right now the library contains over 4 million songs that we use to find the best fixes for your music. The reason it may sometimes pull a different album then expected is because TidySongs looks for original album art over compilation/best of albums. We’ve found that the majority of users prefer original song details so that is why it is set up this way.
The best way to get support on TidySongs is through email so please send me an email at kelly [at] tidysongs [dot] com with any questions that come up during the fixing process.
Thanks!
January 2nd, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Wow, 4 million songs?! I’m wondering how then Tidysongs managed to get over 50% of my 10,000 songs wrong and made a complete mess of my iTunes library. I have spent many hours updating and correcting the labels and titles in iTunes and was looking forward to adding some artwork. I wasn’t expecting Tidysongs to “explode” all my albums and DJ mixes into individual files as well as label them as completely incorrect tracks from incorrect albums while telling me it thinks it’s 99% right. It also got the genres wrong 90% of the time (Rooftop Soundcheck by Justice System as Rock for example). Now that I’ve started my rant, I might as well continue…Tidysongs also doesn’t recognise “best of” albums or compilations, instead it renames the track and places it under the original album. Then there’s the multiple album covers for one album (The Return of Jack Splash by Plantlife. 3 different covers, one of them being no cover at all followed by 4 genres, Soul, Album Cover?, CD Album, and Pop/Rap. I think there was a fifth on in there somewhere). Quite frankly Tidysongs is rubbish and I wouldn’t waste your money on it like I have. I had high hopes to view album artwork on my Sonos and this program isn’t the one to do it.
February 14th, 2010 at 3:07 pm
I get the same problem ERROR CONNECTING TO TIDYSERVER. I installed the program on Feb 14, 2010 at 10:00am used it and thought it would be a good buy, at 10:45 I paid for the program. At 11:58 I send an e-mail asking for my money back if I am not getting the error connection to tidyserver then I am getting an error telling me that itunes is not responding when in fact it is….. NOT HAPPY WITH THIS PRODUCT….
February 24th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I get the same error.
I have purchased TuneUp, and will provide my receipt as proof that your program does not work. Why else would I buy it?
I have 3 words for the TidySongs people:
REFUND MY MONEY.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:51 am
I second this! Where do I go to get my Refund!
April 4th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
I get the not responding error for sure. I think my timeframe matches yours exactly.
I’ll never recommend this program to anyone. Not even my enemies!
October 18th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Wow…
I had my iTunes really organized. After trying this application and doing each song manually… All I did was hit “skip” this program was wrong about 90 percent of the time!! It was funny because it would find a song with all the information already correct and tell me it was wrong or give me some other album art that was not relevant at all!.
This application was a huge disappointment!
November 24th, 2009 at 10:35 am
I have had the same problem as Jim, my itunes was a mess before, now it is worse!
The customer care is good, but having thought I had bought a quick fix to the possible hours of trawling through my music files, it looks like I have tripled that time, and as there seems to be little file evidence of the bizarre changes made, it’s a lot more complicated. Maybe I was a fool to run it on auto, but on manual it would take just as much time as if I hadn’t bought tidysongs in the first place.
The worse thing is having my albums previously copied from my own records split into 3 or 4 albums in my itunes, but not in my files… what?!
This is a great idea, but it is not worth the money AT ALL, a lot more work needs to be on this software and they’re sourcing.
January 11th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
The best thing about TidySongs is that they are really good at taking care of the customers. Quick turn-around on bugs and fixes and they are very responsive. That’s a recipe for success. Keep up the good work TidySongs team. Worth my $$$ as it saves time and frustration.
April 30th, 2010 at 8:40 am
If this isn’t the biggest amount of BS that I have ever heard!
January 12th, 2010 at 1:47 am
This is at the adverse Tidy… it is right down Messy. If your willing to pay for something then paid for something that doesn’t mess up, not even once….TuneUp Media.
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Don’t bother with this. I bought it to take care of a problem that I have with duplicate tracks and it only found 18 duplicates in my entire library when I know I have over 2000+. Also the track & artwork matching is a joke. I have emailed customer service multiple times and they will not write me back or refund my money. Tidysongs is a scam IMHO.
January 29th, 2010 at 4:42 am
stay away from this. this program destroyed my itunes library. thank god it only did so to the 100 sample songs i can “fix”. now all my songs have wrong names. thanks a bunch tidysongs.
January 30th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
This program has yet to ever work correctly for me. I only have a couple thousand songs and it keeps saying that it cannot connect to the servers when there is a internet connection.
February 8th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
I wouldn’t recommend using TidySongs waste of money in my opinion. I have tried to contact them with the bugs and issues I was having and have NEVER heard from them. What kind of product support is that??
Hardly ever got the song information right or the album artwork. Pretty painful all round.
Wish I had found these comments before…
February 8th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
TidySongs was horrible, I suppose it pulls data from Amazon but it wouldn’t find albums release as much as 2 months ago. what the heck TidySongs!
February 12th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Don’t buy this; it doesn’t work at all. I bought and ran TidyMusic, and was forced to constantly re-connect with its server or re-enter the activation code. Finally, it said the code had been entered too many times and stopped running. When I loaded my library onto my iPod, there was no difference at all, still many different versions of an artist’s name.
Bogus.
February 16th, 2010 at 2:41 am
downloaded Feb 15th Got lots of “uh ohs restart Itunes” and “failed to connect to server” and when I finally got through 1659 songs 4 hours later….. nothing changed and from what I read from above probably a good thing!!!! doubt I will get a refund too…. Program needs lots of work it is not ready for distribution.
February 21st, 2010 at 2:39 pm
I have to concur with the others here who’ve had problems with TidySongs. The long and short of it is that TidySongs, while a nice idea, is not ready for prime time. Basically, they’re charging for the privilege of being a beta tester (more like alpha).
You will got lots of “failed to connect to server” responses. When TidySongs actually does manage to work, it only gets through a couple of hundred songs before hanging indefinitely or going back to another “failed to connect to server error”. This may be a blessing because should you actually have TidySongs “clean up” your library you’ll find that its accuracy is spotty at best. It seems unable to reconcile songs from live albums with the studio releases. So, you’ll find that it attempts to mark live recordings as studio albums.
Oh, and don’t bother emailing the company with problems. They don’t respond.
Basically, this software has all the hallmarks of cheap, half-baked shareware developed in someone’s garage. I consider it a lesson learned wasting my money on this, but I’d advise anyone considering purchasing TidySongs to seek other solutions. This software is broken and the company does not respond to help requests.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Hey – so I’ve seen a lot of sites either bagging or defending this product “Tidy Songs”.
I felt the same as a lot of other people who purchased the product and feel ripped off. At this stage there is no way the product is worth $30.00… the potential is there.
I kept getting an error – not responding to itunes. I then did some research and found that what caused this error was missing and lost files (where your playlist points itunes to a file that no longer exist, either because its been deleted or moved).
So I have found a fix, and this is coming from someone who know next to nothing bout computers.
What you need to do – if you have gone and bought this program and been let down…
1. Search the net for a script called “Super remove dead tracks”
It free – and when you run it it will go through your Itunes and clear these missing or “dead” files.
2. Once you have run it, then use TidySongs to remove duplicates. (by moving them to a new folder)
3. Then re run the script “Super remove dead tracks” (I say this because tidy songs leaves missing files in your itunes when using the “remove duplicate” process – I learnt this from experience. Its no big deal – it just makes it hard for you to clean your itunes as quick as you expected…
4. Next – you fix all your songs – this time it should work. if you come up with any errors.. go and do the first three steps one more time. and try again.
And once it has finally fixed all your songs, do the process again one more time for piece of mind.
Tidy songs – your product has potential.
The biggest problem with the program is that the program itself leaves “dead” tracks in your itunes when you remove duplicates, which in turns gives you errors when it comes to “fixing your songs”.
The biggest problem with your management and sale of the product is that you didn’t bother to tell anyone this when you sold it to us. (or respond to any email sent to you)
Its embarrassing for you and your product that I am writing this solution on a blog on this random site when this solution should already be available to anyone who bought your product.
I suggest you contact who ever it was who wrote the “Super remove dead tracks” script and thank them. (By the way there are a few apps i have found that incorporate the same script… just do some research).
I EXPECT! to see this on tidy song’s webpage in the near future, as a temporary fix before a new flash bang update fixing this is brought out (free for all the user who jumped on the band wagon to early.
Hope this helps anyone who made the same mistake I did.
SEAN
April 18th, 2010 at 11:47 am
I tried the Super Remove script and it said I didn’t have any to remove. I have a new computer with fresh installs and imports of iTunes files. No joy. Still having the same problem and getting a “lost connection” every 10 seconds.
March 11th, 2010 at 10:48 am
Don’t use this program. It’s a steep price at $39, particularly given the stability issues it has. It wouldn’t fix my songs, and after several attempts to get support for the product with NO RESPONSE whatsoever, I have filed a claim with my credit card to be refunded.
Bad software. Steer clear!
March 18th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I bought Tidy songs to fix a small percentage of my 4000 odd songs. It did nothing but mess up my entire collection splitting albums out.
Tidysongs did reply telling me the reason it did this is because they were compilation albums and that is the way their programworks because customers prefer it.
I had two problems with this a) the albums iit split were not compilations I had stipulated this in my first email and b) who is it exactly who wants 20 odd albums with only one song on each when they could have the original compilation album with all the songs that belong on it?
My review = terrible, over priced program that hasn’t been trialed or advertised properly.
Tidysongs will ruin your itunes library and waste your time!
March 21st, 2010 at 12:42 am
This software is an upgrade from what used to be FixTunes from Cloudbrain which never worked for me other than causing me more headaches. Although this iteration has a more user friendly GUI I haven’t had much better luck with it. It promises to “fix” songs, find duplicates, missing album art, etc. by connecting to the TidySongs server and comparing your itunes library with their database. It only works within itunes and downloads and installs AdobeAir also. Agreeably, my itunes library was a true test for it as it was a mess… duplicates, partial names, limited album art, etc. I had to run the scan of my itunes library numerous times because it kept dropping the connection to their server…. not necessarily their fault. And if you don’t have a moderately decent fast connection (I didn’t) you have to manually set tidysongs to give each song an appropriate length of time to find the missing info on the server. I had to set mine at 10+ seconds, the downside of this is if it finds the info more quickly you still have to wait for the software to countdown from 10 to zero before it tries the next song. I have over 9,000 songs so… hmmm…. let’s do the math… over 24 hr’s of solid scan time to get through my itunes library. All the time using significant PC resources as both TidySongs and itunes are hogging CPU & memory. Well, if it worked as promised, I could live with that. But the truth is that I have ended up with a worse mess after several attempts. TidySongs creates a couple of playlists within itunes, one called ‘songs fixed with tidysongs’, and another called ‘skipped songs’… songs it can’t figure out what to do with so it ignores them altogether. The number of songs that TidySongs says that it fixed or skipped is considerablly more than what ends up in the ‘fixed and/or skipped’ playlists so I’m left wondering if it really fixed anything to begin with. And every time I had to relaunch because of a server disconnection it would double the number of songs in my itunes library (don’t ask me how or why)and would start from square one again, ignoring the fact that I had un-checked the “include previously fixed or skipped songs” checkbox. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software to reset the count to zero and start fresh but obviously something in the registry needs deleted to do that because it installed with all the aberrant numbers once again. I ran a scan for duplicates and TidySongs found 28 duplicates in 9,000+ songs in my library….many, many times less than itunes itself found. When I clicked on the ‘help’ tab within TidySongs all I got was an email address to Kelly@TidySongs…. no online support whatsoever. I emailed Kelly and got quick (no weekend support) response to a couple of my initial simple questions. I’m still waiting for answers to the more difficult questions which continued to pop up the more I used the software. So Tidy Songs doesn’t have a clue where it’s at or what it’s doing at this point…. and neither do I… at least with my itunes library. Maybe if you had a small manageable itunes library that pretty much was intact already….. but then why would you need TidySongs…. And at $39 price who needs the added frustration of false promises…. ps…. I just searched youtube for TidySongs tutorials and everyone of them has been disabled for comments…. does that tell you anything?
March 24th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
Hey Kelly McPhee???? Are you listening here???
March 24th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
After a week of slogging through my itunes library and manually fixing tidysongs f&$*ups I tried Tuneup as mentioned by another poster here…. much, much better. I actually think it works pretty well. And they have a discount promo code too… just type in “lucky” in the promo code box and get 20% off… so that makes it a way better buy @ $24 for lifetime service on same computer, allows you to switch to another PC a second time…. and it works. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
April 21st, 2010 at 10:49 am
I tried the very limited “free” version. it kept freezing up, and a pop-up appears advising to buy the $39. Premium version. I gave up after a dozen tries and went on You-Tube and easily learned how to add album artwork manually. I was able to acquire all the correct artwork for some rather obscure albums myself. Now Tidysongs has left an advertisement for their dysfunctional program on my iTunes Playlist claiming they “fixed” a couple of my albums. I’ll have to manually change the artwork on the albums in question and see if their tag goes away.
Save your money on this one, It’s not worth your time and aggravation.
May 3rd, 2010 at 8:50 am
i have had trouble with Tidy Songs making incomplete duplicate searches. It seems to get some but not them all. with my large library, this is quite frustrating and brings me no closer to my goal of having a clean library.
i have contacted Kelly about the issue and got no response other than “we are working on it” and several weeks later, i have still not heard back. i recently asked to have my money refunded and she sent me this message:
“We don’t provide the refund here because the purchase was made through Clickbank. You have to make the request through Clickbank since that is where your purchase was made. Please reference their refund policies and information to find out how to get a refund. ”
damn, if i gave money to Tidysongs then why cant they give it back to me? and if you really don’t wont to fool with the third party refund process, could you at least send me to link that will actually help me get me money back?
too bad that TIdysongs is apparently not interested providing quality customer service or a program that works……. save your money on this one folks!
June 2nd, 2010 at 1:26 pm
Trial period? What trial period? There is no trial period! It scans a mere 100 songs for duplicates and that’s it! It found NO duplicates and I know that’s bogus because I have TONS of them! I haven’t written them but I thought about doing so saying “If you want me to pay your company $30.00 you better give me more than 100 songs to test this software out with because I have over 8,000 songs in my library! At least let me test out 10%! I’m glad I found this site with all the unhappy people!
June 9th, 2010 at 12:01 am
I just purchased the program and immediatley after paying the website I got an error message and was redircted to Internet explorer error page. I Tried multiply times to download the program to no avail. Now im just fed up with the damn thing and just want my money back. This program and company are a pile of Sh!t.
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:42 am
I agree with everyone here that this is a terrible program – constantly crashed and messes up the artwork and songs so much that it was worse than when I started. Now using TuneUp and what a difference – Professional tech support (used them once for minor issue) and very stable and has sorted I guess around 98% of my collection of 8000 tracks.
July 17th, 2010 at 1:52 am
Complete scam. Joshua Schnell should tell us that this product is not free or that the free version is so limited as to be unusable. Thanks for wasting my time Joshua Schnell.
July 17th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I know it’s extremely difficult to look up the post date before shooting off your bullshit comment, but his post was written ages ago. They had a trial during that period of time. Don’t question my integrity when you’re clearly not smart enough to realize that these articles get frozen in time.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
You guys should take a look at MusicBrainz Picard. It find the tags based on a music print of the song. Once properly tagged, you can run several duplicate removal apps: Duppin, Idupe, Itune, etc. BTW from all the softwares i’ve tried, Picard and Dupin worked really well and fast.