Fix Your Digital Music Collection with FixTunes

[Damion Chaplin]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.fixtunes.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.fixtunes.com/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Your music collection will never be the same. If you have more than a few MP3s on your computer, you know what we're talking about. Missing album names. Misspelled titles. Ten different spellings for the same artist. Browsing is not a pretty experience. You need FixTunes. FixTunes will scan your music files and download the correct artist, album, title, track numbers, release year, genre and even album cover art. No hours spent typing or looking up album names, FixTunes will clean up your MP3 files automatically. And it doesn't just work for popular music, either. FixTunes utilizes a database of over 56,000 artists, over 188,000 albums and over 3 million tracks! Everything from pop, rock, classical and obscure jazz. If the song is from a commercially available CD, chances are its in the database. Other programs claim to help you rename files but still make you type in all the information. FixTunes is automatic - no typing!"</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/FixTunesScreenshot.jpg" /> <br /><br />As someone who just spent an entire weekend cleaning up my music collection so it would display properly on the Zune, I can say I really wish I had a piece of software like this. FixTunes looks like a very powerful piece of software that's easy to use. Plus, they have a really cool <a href="http://www.fixtunes.com/albumbrowser.htm">Album Browser</a> that displays all of the albums you have in a certain category as a pile of graphics on your desktop. You can shuffle them around just like it was a pile of CDs. Double-click an album to play it. Sounds like it would be awesome for parties. FixTunes will run you $24.95 and there's a trial available that will allow you to use it for 50 songs. If you download it, let us know what you think.

[Macguy59]

So it would display properly? What a great way to spend your time.

[Tim Williamson]

LOL. Lately I've used MediaMonkey which searches Amazon to find the album info and artwork, then retags it based on the search. It's free.

[Jason Dunn]

LOL. Lately I've used MediaMonkey which searches Amazon to find the album info and artwork, then retags it based on the search. It's free.

Yeah, but MediaMonkey only works if you already have enough of the song info to make it work - this looks like it works from acoustic fingerprinting, which is way different and likely way better...so there's definitely a place for tools such as this.

[Tim Williamson]

Oh maybe I'll have to try it again...it seems like I recall trying it out and it didn't work right, but I could be thinking of some other MP3 tagger.

[Jason Dunn]

So it would display properly? What a great way to spend your time.

Have you ever loaded up audio files with mangled metadata onto an iPod or other MP3 player? Trust me, you'll understand the need for this when you can't find a thing on your player. ;-)

[Tim Williamson]

Yeah I did try this, it doesn't have the acoustic recognition, it just finds the song based on existing info. If there's an acoustic recognition program that works accurately I'd love to check it out. :)

[Jeff_R]

Finally registered with DMT; I just had to let people know about my experiences with this program. I tried this out on a small test group of MP3s and it worked fine, so I bought it. Now it crashes every single time I use it. Out of any 20 MP3s I try, it will get stuck on 1 or 2; if I remove these from the list, the program will hang and then crash on next start-up, requiring a "Reset Library", which means I need to re-enter all my set-up info.

Also, the registration code only allows five uses, and it's already asked me to enter it twice, so that may or may not be a problem; I won't know until I need to use it another three times.

Also, the database seems to be based almost entirely on Amazon.com and works from existing tags, not acoustic recognition. Personally, I've found Tag&amp;Rename to be a MUCH better product, so I will be registering that, and lamenting that I spent money on this product. Tag&amp;Rename, which can also use Amazon.com for album art, won't recognize single files for searching, but since FixTunes crashes so much, its ability to do this is of minimal use to me. It's faster for me to manually correct the tags and search Google for album art than to deal with all the crashes and resets. Also, even when it doesn't crash, the accuracy is weird. Sometimes it will nail an obscure tune in one go, and other times I'll give it a full album that is currently available (A Prairie Home Companion soundtrack, for example), and it will completely mis-guess, even though all tags are properly filled out and all I want is the album art.

I should have been warned off by the fact that there were only 50 MP3s allowed rather than a seven or fourteen day trial; the former didn't show me how this program would fail to function, but the latter would have.

Having said all this, it may be just something with my computer, but I've found this program to be completely frustrating and a waste of time. I've searched forums for solutions, and I've only found tales of tech support questions going unanswered and the company's own forums being taken down, so I've just decided to write off that $25 and move on.

If you are going to try this out, make sure you try it as you really would. Show it as big a directory of MP3s as you would normally want it to work on; my mistake was creating a small test directory so it wouldn't affect my library, and as such the testing was far more forgiving than any reasonable real use scenario could be.

Anyway, thanks for the Thoughts site family, Jason! Big fan!

[Jason Dunn]

Yeah I did try this, it doesn't have the acoustic recognition, it just finds the song based on existing info. If there's an acoustic recognition program that works accurately I'd love to check it out. :)

&lt;groan> Seriously? Ok, their marketing material is very mis-leading then - I know they didn't mention fingerprinting, but the demo looked so "magical" I thought it HAD to be based on fingerprinting.

I was told that WMP11 does fingerprinting, but I've never tested it because my music is in good shape now (finally). ;-) I think the Yahoo! Music client also had some good lookup features.

[spoirier]

I am also having problems with FixTunes. After trying it on my music collection and liking the results I registered it too. I have written to support about this and will cut them some slack during the holidays. I will report back here when I hear back from them or in a week, which ever is sooner.

[sojourner753]

I've been using MediaMonkey to fix my library. Its pretty manual from album to album. And my library is only about 15GB.

My problem is WMP11 somehow picked up the wrong album art for some of mine. MediaMonkay and SageTV are both shoing the right art though. I created a post here (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11561).

[Jason Kravitz]

I bought FixTunes after seeing the news on DMT but before reading this thread :(

Seems to be working ok for me so far &lt;crossing fingers> I let it run all night on about 80gb of music and it was still chugging in the morning although it has not gotten too far. This was in the "Lookup" phase not the fix phase. I have not tried fixing a large number of files yet.

One thing I'm kind of annoyed with is MCE 2005 does not recognize my albums because it looks for Artist Album field instead of just the Artist. FixTunes does not allow you to update the Artist Album field so this is an additional step I'll have to do on all my music.

Does anyone have a recommended way of getting albums to show up in MCE ?

[Jason Dunn]

Does anyone have a recommended way of getting albums to show up in MCE ?

Use www.mediamonkey.com to fix your media - it's batch-based and REALLY fast and powerful.

[Jason Kravitz]

Thanks Jason
I was about to start writing a perl script but this is probably easier :)

[spoirier]

So far I have not heard a word from Cloudbrain so I have sent their support folks another mail asking what is going on.

I am also having problems with FixTunes. After trying it on my music collection and liking the results I registered it too. I have written to support about this and will cut them some slack during the holidays. I will report back here when I hear back from them or in a week, which ever is sooner.

[spoirier]

Still no word from them and I've even asked for a refund. I guess this turned out to be a big mistake.

So far I have not heard a word from Cloudbrain so I have sent their support folks another mail asking what is going on.

I am also having problems with FixTunes. After trying it on my music collection and liking the results I registered it too. I have written to support about this and will cut them some slack during the holidays. I will report back here when I hear back from them or in a week, which ever is sooner.