Picture it. 6,000 music tracks in your collection, 200-some artists, 500-some albums. Strewn about your iTunes library like your 7-year-old’s room. But wait, you don’t have to picture it, do you? Because this, friends, is reality. Tidy Songs would have you believe it will selflessly slave over your music collection, scrubbing down the dirty tags and misspellings like some kind of clean freak. But can it live up to our demands?
Tidy Songs is an Adobe Air app that loads to a simple welcome screen which lets you get started pretty quickly. There’s no setup to do. Just click Start and you’re whisked off to the Main Menu where you select from 4 options: Add Album Art, Find Duplicates, Fix Your Songs, and Organize Genres. They’re all pretty self explanatory, so let’s get right into it.
Add Album Art works like a charm. It looks up the songs in a selected playlist (you can choose to scan your entire library as well) and checks them against it’s sources (I’m assuming one of them to be Amazon). When a discrepancy is detected, it presents its findings to you and you can choose to keep the current artwork, add the new artwork, or input your own URL where the correct artwork is located, and it will download it for you.
Find Duplicates worked well in my tests as well. There is the option to automatically delete these duplicates according to bit rate and song length, however this one you’ll probably need to manually approve each change, especially if you have a lot of live albums where song titles are exactly the same.
Fixing songs themselves proved to be a little tricky for me. To test this functionality, I made some changes to my song titles and documented each change. All of my semi-popular music was recognized and fixed without a hitch. However, my problems arose when summoning information on more obscure bands, and if you have a lot of this kind of music, you may have to use the Manual mode here as well. I don’t fault Tidy Songs for this, as I would think this is a problem with the tracklist and information in the public database it is querying. However, if you’ve got a lot of well to semi-well-known artists in your library, Tidy Songs should have no problem clearing up any weird titles and information. Speed-wise, if you’re going to let it do its thing automatically, and depending on how many songs you have, I’d let it go overnight. In my own library of a few thousand songs, it took quite a few hours to complete its scans and fixes. Also, you can’t listen to music through iTunes while it’s cleaning, so either do it while you won’t be home, or fire up Pandora and check out some new music while you wait.
Probably the feature I found the least use for was Organize Genres. It simply allows you to change all of the variations on a genre to one. For example, I have varying genres of Rock in my library such as Alternative-Rock, Alt-punk, Indie, Indie-Pop, Rock/Pop, Indie Rock|you get the picture. It offers to take all of these and combine them into one category of its or your choosing.
While fixing, you can tell Tidy Songs to skip songs with certain words as well, giving you an added “Don’t touch” filter. All in all, the app works great. Compared to TuneUp, my experience was above and beyond what I ever expected it to be, and that experience comes with a price tag. $39 to be exact. Worth it? I’d say yes. Especially if your library is big and in rough shape. You could spend days retagging and reorganizing a large iTunes library- let Tidy Songs do it for you.
Related posts:
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- New iTunes Preview Rules: 90 Seconds For Songs Over 150 Seconds. Don’t Like It? Get Out.
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December 28th, 2010 at 8:42 am
[...] Dan Gribbin from Macapper reviewed TidySongs and pointed out the features of the program that he found helpful. He found that artwork for iTunes was one of the more helpful features. From his blog: “It looks up the songs in a selected playlist (you can choose to scan your entire library as well) and checks them against it's sources (I'm assuming one of them to be Amazon). When a discrepancy is detected, it presents its findings to you and you can choose to keep the current artwork, add the new artwork, or input your own URL where the correct artwork is located, and it will download it for you.” [...]
December 28th, 2010 at 8:42 am
Thanks for telling your readers about us, Dan! I created some discount codes for the first 25 users who purchase TidySongs. Use the discount code: “macapper” to receive the discounted price. Email me at kelly@tidysongs.com if you have any questions for us.
Thanks!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:42 am
Thanks for the codes, Kelly! I hope some of our readers take advantage of it!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Hiya,
Thank you for detailed review. But I have a question. I speak five languages, so I listen music in different languages. (mostly English, Spanish, Russian and Turkish). So, can TidySongs organise my library?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
@Bakhtier I would recommend using our free trial. We let you pick 100 songs to fix and this would be a good way for you to test if TidySongs is the right program for you. Our database consists of mostly English song titles and album information, but using the trial would be helpful so that you can tell how TidySongs will be able to organize for you.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I just bought this w/o trying it. BIG mistake, INHO!
This app has the most convoluted installation of any app I’ve ever seen.
It is tied to one Mac so it can’t be used on a laptop after it has been installed on a desktop.
This app runs outside of iTunes so one can’t see anything in the context of iTunes. When I am Fixing songs one by one (review before fix) I am not given any indication what data is being fixed. That is a total deal breaker for me. How stupid of the developer not to highlight the perceived error.
The Help button links to an unlinked email address and a linked twitter address. There is no documentation anywhere that I could find.
The install placed a 1.9 MB TidySongs Utility item in my Applications folder and a 397 KB TidySongs App on my desktop. Why two things?
Looking up album cover art has an annoying reflection applied to the preview view when you choose to do it one by one. This can make it difficult to see some of the text on some album art. There is also no indication as to the size of the previewed art nor are there options available.
I don’t know why there are so many items skipped when I go to do something to a playlist.
Compared to TuneUp, which is much less expensive, this program doesn’t come off very well.
I sure wish I had tried this out in advance and I sure wish that there was a refund available.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Hugh -
I’m the lead developer for TidySongs (I like to think I’m not dumb, but who knows…). I’d like to address a couple of your points:
1) TidySongs uses two files “App” and “Utility”. They are both necessary – one is the interface you see and use and the other is a helper file that “talks” to iTunes. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t play very well with other programs and this two-program method is necessary. You can move them both to your Applications folder, but they are both necessary.
2) You can see what data is being fixed. TidySongs shows you the current song details and what they are being fixed too. Fixed songs are then put in a special iTunes playlist so you can see the results.
3) TidySongs always uses the largest available album art image size. This is what users have always asked for. If a smaller size is added to a song, that is because that is the largest size available. As for the reflection… We thought it looked cool. I’m sorry if you don’t like it.
4) TidySongs will “skip” songs it doesn’t know how to fix (because it can’t find information on the song). You can help TidySongs fix the skipped songs by adding a little bit of information (like an artist name).
I’m sorry you had issues with the program.
We’re really proud of TidySongs and think it is the best way out there to fix a lot of your songs quickly.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Daniel,
Thank you for the reply.
Mea Culpa!! My fault entirely for not seeing the part of the window that, in hindsight, clearly shows the data being changed. I guess it was the lack of highlighting that caused my temporary blindness.
I apologize for any insinuation that you might be dumb or stupid.
I feel, in retrospect, that the methodology used by TidySongs is really meant as a simple method for most people to rapidly fix problems with their iTunes library. For one-click simplicity I would suggest TidySongs to anyone.
For my needs I prefer a more integrated solution but there is no question that such a solution is somewhat more complex and requires more effort on the part of the user that the elegant TidySongs approach.
As an example I would point to the album art aspect. TidySongs will supply the largest available album art image. The user will have, in most cases, the correct art and in all cases they will have attractive art where they previously had nothing. Other programs may provide several images in various sizes which allow the user to select, manually, the UK import album artwork or perhaps the artwork without a “sale” banner that sometimes appears on Amazon albums. TidySongs will unquestionably provide the tidiest cleanup with the least amount of user effort. For the majority of users I am sure it will be perfect.
In my case I have a large iTunes library that has consumed many hours/days/weeks/months of time spent entering data. It was in the pursuit of the latest and greatest that I bought TidySongs without trying it out first. Its simplicity hid its capabilities and I was looking for something that would give me an edge in fine-tuning that is not, at least in my use, the purpose of TidySongs.
I encourage people to try TidySongs. I think the majority will enjoy the results.
It is perfect for filling in the details and artwork that most people have found missing in their iTunes library.
Kelly kindly refunded my purchase price so I can recommend the promptness of the Cloudbrain customer service. Thank you very much,
Hugh
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Daniel, I too bought Tidy Songs without trying it based on this review. No problems with the install or anything, but the program cannot finish running a session on my iTunes to eliminate all the duplicate songs I have. My library, which is about 70,000 songs, is mostly dupes, with maybe 4000 unique individual songs. Would this be an issue with your program? The error I keep getting is that iTunes stopped responding or severed the connection with Tidy Songs.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
You know what, I spent WEEKS cleaning my iTunes library — and I promise I have the cleanest library you’re likely to find thanks to my growing OCD and my wife being away on a movie set — and I still recommend doing it by hand. There’s just too much an app can get wrong.
There’s nothing Wikipedia and a little google-fu can’t do.
That said I, the first place to start is Album Art Exchange (http://www.albumartexchange.com/covers.php?sort=3&q=&fltr=1&bgc=&page=) for really, really high quality cover art. Amazon only if you have to and after a trip to Discogs.org. Bing.com is surprisingly good with image searches too.
Seriously, DIY.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I have an itunes file with over 240,000 songs. According to itunes, almost 145,000 are duplicates.
Can Tidy Songs handle a file of this size? How long would it take to run against a file this large (over 1tb)? I’m not interested in doing anything in manual mode.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Itunes not responding in tidysongs arrg why me by the way my tune up isnt working either something is terrribly wrong, tuneup says some tracks not found, tidysongs crashes, ive sent logs sigh.. help.. tidysongs uhoh itunes not responding please restart
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Ross,
you can use some applescripts to fix this.
look for Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes at google.
\
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Thanks GabrielCP……I have a PC and not a MAC. So, I’m still looking into other possible fixes. I have a backup for my Itunes file, so I will probably use a program that looks for duplicate files and deletes them. Then I will see what I have. My original file will still be intact if something goes South.
I still have about 100 CD’s to add before I try this fix. Fun and games!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Save your cash, there are so many free ways to tidy up your itunes.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 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!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I am in the same boat as Hugh. I have a fairly large library, about 19000 songs, and I know I have tons of duplicates. I bought Tidysongs to help me clear out the dupes. I have tried running the application dozens of times with zero success. Tidysongs either drops the connection to Itunes, which is weird since both programs reside on my C: drive, or it says that I may need to update my file permissions, whatever that means. It seems to recognize the total volume of my songs, since the total songs number corresponds to the number of songs that I have in my library. Okay, so Tidysongs has found zero duplicate songs, which is just stupid. I sent two emails through the help screen to a person named Kelly. It has been at least a week, and so far, no one from Tidysongs has responded to my request for help. That brings up another thing: there is little to no supporting documentation with this product, and the extent of the help window is that if the user is having trouble with the program, then send an email to Kelly. I wish I had done more research, as I have wasted the investment money as well as dozens of hours of searching on google for some help with this program. After getting no response from my request for help, I have asked for a refund, but so far nobody from this company has responded. At this point, I would not advise anyone to buy Tidysongs!
It might work, but not for me. No results, no help, no refund equals NO GOOD!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I installed this and it won’t even try to run on windows XP.
Restarted the machine and it still won’t start up.
Doesn’t make me want to give up my $40
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Works on my Mac but has yet to find the right tagging info for the song. What good is tagging software that you have to put the artist and the song name in?
There has to be software out there that can read the signature of a song and tag it.
iPhone app Shazam can pick a song from playing it and tell you what it is. Why can’t these apps do the same thing?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I am the same i only have 2000 songs and the program will freeze after it has searched for no more than 60 seconds. I am based in the UK is this maybe a reason for it, i have also noticed on some albums you have found the covers for are incorrect its taking the artist rather than the album name so i am having to fix this manually. I use a PC with windows XP and not an apple mac could this be an issue although it shouldnt as the website states it should work with this but it seems not to.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I bought Tidy Songs about a month ago, and I’ve had nothing but issues with it. I used the trial, and it seemed to work for my needs, and the install and use of it wasn’t a problem. But since I bought the full version, I’ve had nothing but issues and very little help from the company (I would just use the FAQ or a board on their site, but there wasn’t anything useful on there). I don’t know if I’m the only one having this many issues (which I find hard to believe since I’m not a total computer idiot) but it’s kind of ridiculous.
I keep getting different error messages saying it can’t connect to iTunes or the internet (when clearly I’m connected to both since I’m posting here).
It also gets maybe a max of 100 songs before freezing up, then when I go back to the main screen and try to start over, it just sits idly and then I have to close and open the program again.
I got ONE email for support, saying to try and lengthen the program time so it takes 10 sec a track (hoping that would prevent an error from occuring) but that didn’t do anything, and the program is still extremely glitchy.
For a program of this cost, and this limited, I’m extremely disappointed and will definitely be spreading the word.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Well, I’m a sucker as well. I figured 50 free songs wasn’t going to cut it for the trial. So I bought the full version thinking obviously there’s not many WINDOWS versions out there that will fix the duplicates. Problem is when it piles them into ONE folder, I have to go threw all of the songs to make sure they really are duplicates. If you don’t do that, it WILL erase your albums. That’s really stupid. The whole point of paying the money is to have it at least be successful 99.9 percent of the time. I did an estimate of how many songs it erased or pulled out that were not duplicates, 39%! That’s horrible! And it didn’t get all the duplicates, I went back into a search folder and found over 200 still hanging around, what the Deal!? I understand that there may be a number in front of the song or different ways of how people type them in, but why does it erase songs that are not duplicates to begin with? On top of that I figured it would organize my files where I had them to begin with, nope it moved them all under itunes folder twice, where I never store all my songs. I actually had them organized by genare. It’s just a good thing all I have to do is erase the stupid mistakes it’s made and go to my external hard drive and download how I had it to begin with. I hope someone reads this and just does it the hard way because it’s the only way WINDOWS people can do it. Itunes has a tab for duplicates, click on that and just use the ctrl tab with the mouse to get rid of them. At least then you know it’s not someone elses User Error because they can’t do code for the program right.
Tidy Get a Clue your program is not Faulty proof, obvisouly you moved it into production with out fixing all the bugs. Even the one where it disconnects from itunes because Genius is running in the background. That happens all the time if you don’t stop Genius. The next bug you need to work on is adding a couple of lines in your code of what to really erase. If it’s going to just erase my music folder I can do that myself. Also, no one is going to be bright and look through all the duplicate songs folder you create on the screen. If the program is really not sure if it’s a duplicate it should not move it period or ask prior. You know what how about you just pay me to tell you what to fix since you need that information reading forums. No more free bees!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I am a Mac user (Leopard) after the installation everything seems to work fine (recognizes playlists and the songs) but when I try to correct the tag does not make any changes. I do not know what to do, I wonder if the program is installed correctly, since the procedure is somewhat convoluted and difficult (not frendly). I HOPE THAT:
1 – vs. MANY REQUESTS ARE PROVIDED TO ALL THOSE WHO are paying a SERIOUS SUPPORT
2 – being upgraded version of TIDYSONGS tackle the various problems and simplify the process INSTALLATION
3 – IF MY WISH THESE WILL NOT BE FULFILLED hopes to raise a lot of success FROM ALL THOSE WHO HAVE PAID TO COMPANY FOR CAUSE AND DO FARC GIVE MONEY BACK
GRAZIANO
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I’m having a lot of the same problems. I bought this last night in the hopes of letting it run over night. Well I find the same error boxes this morning – Applescript errors and constant dropping of the iTunes connection. I’ve gotten it around 50-60 time so far and now it happens every few seconds – and yes, I have iTunes completely quiescent. I just purchased a new iMac and have not even turned Genius on yet. I’m sending an error report to Tidysongs each time it happens now (it’s getting old) but I hope it mimics a little of the aggravation I’m going through.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
“Uh Oh. Problem.
iTunes is not responding.
Please restart iTunes”
uggg….
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I want my money back. This program simply does not work.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:43 am
I’m having the same issues here, Tidy Songs does not complete the scanning of the duplicate files. Stops at around 50% what the heck I spent 40 Bucks on this!!! I was highly Optimistic and Happy at first when I discovered a program existed such as this but to find that it doesn’t work is highly disappointing.Please help.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Very nice review! You really went in depth with your analysis of the program. Personally I have had quite a bit of success with TIdysongs and would highly recommend the program.
Great job writing an honest review and describing every detail of Tidysongs.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I have Windows 7 64 bit. I used a free utility called Easy Duplicate Finder (Google it) and was able to find 70,000 duplicates on my itunes file of 241,000. Because of the size of my file it took a few hours to run. I ran it twice to make sure the file was clean. It appears to be locked, but give it time it is just chugging away in the background doing it’s thing. One other thing….after it finds the duplicates, right click on the list for a list of options such as delete oldest or delete newest etc.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
TidySongs is a great concept, but a buggy waste of time due to repeated “iTunes not responding” errors. I requested a refund and, frankly, really resent the time I spent screwing around with it.
This would be unacceptable quality for junk software that one finds on trashy freeware sites, much less a $39 purchase.
In addition, the “support” page is little more than fluff, and lacks all of the standard elements that one expects to find: knowledge base, forum, bug reports, work-arounds, technical FAQ, etc. The out-of-date blog is yet more fluff, and the Twitter feeds are pointless and irritating.
I am very supportive of fresh concepts, but poor quality is never, ever acceptable.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 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!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
@jeff
I’m sorry that you’re having difficulty receiving the refund. You purchased TidySongs through an affiliate instead of directly from us, so the refund will need to come from them. This is the link you are looking for: http://www.clickbank.com/orderDetail.htm?clear=true&locale=EN
You’ll put in your clickbank order number from your purchase receipt from clickbank and the purchase will be refunded.
I’m sorry that TidySongs was not the right program for you.
Best Regards,
Kelly
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
tidy songs would be the right program for me if it worked!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I bought Tidy Songs based on some reviews on other sites. All I can say now is stay far away from this program. I have asked for my money back, hopefully that will happen. The program has been running for over 18hours now. I have a lot of songs, over 62k, but all I want to find is duplicates. That should not take 18 hours, and it is only at 34% complete. I could have written my own program in that amount of time. I’m wishing I had at this point.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I just bought Tidy Songs today and it immediately indicated that it couldn’t compete the search for duplicates due to itunes not responding. I don’t think I would complain about much of anything if the program was simply capable of doing the one simple thing it is supposed to do, find duplicates and remove them.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
way to go Jeff, It’s too bad that there’s way too many people that hate this program, great concept piss poor programming skills!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Sure wish I’d read this half hour ago. Now they’ve got my $30 , and all I have is a worthless headache!!!
Uh Oh. Problem.
iTunes is not responding.
Please restart iTunes
I want my $30 bucks back!!! And I bought direct from Tidysong site, but was redirected to clickbank for payment… interesting, almost like laundering
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I emailed support and after a few rounds I got my money back. I too bought the program directly off the tidysongs website. As soon as I mentioned the iTunes not responding error I got my money back. Guess they realize they have a serious issue. I wish the company the best of luck but everyone please stay away from this program, at least until they fix their issues.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Not a bad program but similar issues as others with loss of connection to iTunes.
I used Easy Duplicate Finder (Free) on my win7 machine and then imported all of the songs into an empty iTunes and then ran Pollux ($10) to clean up my tags and artwork. Granted, it took 3+ days to clean up 32000 files but 1) It works 2) it is 1/4 the price AND they will allow you to activate it on your desktop AND laptop after a simple request to support (with a one day turnaround)
I would be tempted to try/wait for fix’s of Tidysongs at $19 but $39????
I dont mind paying more IF the company offers great support but that is not what it looks like they are providing from other posts above.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Nice idea, I was intrigued by the fact that this program works in the background and can auto-clean your library.
However….
- Had Trouble getting the installation to work. Had to uninstall and re-install the whole package including adobe air (why does it run on Adobe Air? I can see why a developer would choose that, but for me it _seemed_ to make things more complicated and I would have preferred a native program.) Communication with TidySongs support was swift.
- TidySongs does not seem to affect the “Last Changed” date shown in iTunes.
- TidySongs does NOT create a Playlist in iTunes for me. Communication with TidySongs support was not quite the same pleasant experience as before: No response after the first email for a week, emailed again and then got the “works for us over here” answer. Well, glad to hear that it works for you guys, but, quite frankly, that does not help me. Another email asking for some more help remained unanswered as of yet. A support inquiry filed twice (more than a week apart from each other) through the software built-in Error-Report feature has not resulted in an answer either.
With that said, I regret to say that I cannot use the software as-is, and I’m sorry to see that the initial good impression of the support responsiveness could not be confirmed later on. I wish I could recommend the software and support a “small” and promising software company, but alas, given the above, I cannot do so at this time. I’m hoping for an update with a fix. Until then, my bottom line is: Great idea, but software needs some more work to make it useable.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
tidysongs crashes way to much after about 5 songs, not good.
oh and if you guys have duplicates on itunes then go file and display duplicates and delete them
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I purchased Tidy Songs and unfortunately my hard drive crashed. I have sent multiple emails to Tidy Songs (Kelly) to find out how I can get a replacement version and there is no response. I am beginning to think that customer service is non existent with this or they believe they will get another purchase out of me. Not the case – will be looking for other options.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Count me in the ranks that are now frustrated by spending $39 to have the program lock up and not complete the job. I wold never reco this program to anyone..
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Don’t pay for Tidysongs. It’s not worth it. You can get it for free with a little work by following this Youtube video. However, it only works sometimes and you need to validate your purchase before you try to use it otherwise it won’t change anything in iTunes. It’s an easy, free way to fix the majority of your songs, however 2/3 of the time it will say “Looking up songs” and get stuck there.
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5izNNMTzXN4
Happy (and unhappy) fixing
Ash.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I wish I had found this website and read the complaints before I paid $39 of hard-earned money for this program! Unlike almost every other Mac program I have downloaded and purchased, it has given me nothing but trouble and disappointment. First I had to re-download Adobe Air because I could get TidySongs to run on double-clicking after a few successful launches. Then when it launches and I try to use it, I repeatedly get the cutesy “Uh oh |” message telling me that iTunes is not responding and to quit and relaunch iTunes; then I get the damn “Uh oh” message over and over again after following its instruction to relaunch iTunes over and over again.
This is simply an unreliable program.
I gave up this afternoon and spent only $15 to download and purchase “Dupin” and it worked IMMEDIATELY on the first try, at first with a few selected groups to gain my confidence, and then with the rest in one fell swoop. No error messages blaming iTunes for not responding which in my opinion is a poor substitute for good programming.
You guys should be ashamed to first promote this program as “FREE” and then clip them for THIRTY-NINE DOLLARS for gosh sakes for a program riddled with error and unreliability.
And I supposed I will be horsed around when I seek a refund. You folks probably slipped a “NO REFUND” clause in there somewhere.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Kudos to ClickBank who responded very quickly and said they were refunding my money.
Now I am trying to get this program off my computer and everytime I try to drag it to the trash I get a message that “TidySongs App” can’t be moved to the Trash because it’s open! Even when I hold down the Option key.
I checked the Activity Monitor on my laptop and it doesn’t list the app as running, so I can’t do a force delete.
How do I get rid of this wretched program? What the heck is it doing?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
can Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes help with the Applescript error? I can only get through a small subset of the songs before I have to close programs and restart for the process to start working again.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Thanks for writing this Tidysongs review and hosting such an active discussion. I was close to purchasing this program this morning to help deal with over 10,000 duplicates. From the responses I’m confident I’d have had problems and been out the $30. *sigh* now off to a Sunday filled with manual deletions.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Why settle for manual deletions, Deftone? I found that Dupin does it all without problems. I think I paid $15 for it.
You can get it off the Apple site at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/dupin.html
Nate
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Moved over from Fix Tunes to Tidy Songs. Sorry to say that this is one of the most aggravating and useless programs I have used in quite some time. Constant drops of the connection to the Tidy Songs “server”. Makes me think it is being hosted on an old 8-bit C-64. Ridiculous waste of both time and money. Great concept; NO EXECUTION!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
as others stated, really wish I would have found this website before I purchased also. I ran the simulator before purchasing, worked well, found 1753 duplicates…OH, this is Awesome!! I’ll purchase the entire thing and have them deleted, then add some artwork that’s missing…boy, was that a waste…as soon as I bought it, ran the duplicates again. Guess what, it found 1!!!, really 1!, thats 1752 less then the free simulator. nice way of stealing peoples money! Then, I said, ok, whatever, lets to some artwork…guess what, like many here, “uh oh, itunes problem” I got this message 22 times before I gave up before throwing something at the computer…Guess what tidysongs, it’s not itunes, it’s your program! one would think they would listen to their customers..So, now I have wasted 39 dollars, which as a med student is a ton of money! and of course the company won’t reply to my emails…so, I figured I’ll try today and see, well, now I can’t even open the damn program! you have got to be kidding me! hell, this shouldn’t even be free…it should still be in beta. Hope my paypal dispute works
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Paul,
I would advise you not to just complain to PayPal but also directly to ClickBank. I learned that they have an excellent customer refund program. See:
http://www.clickbank.com/help/vendor-help/vendor-tools/customer-support-ticket-system/
and they promptly refunded my money. You should get yours back too.
Good luck in medical school.
Nate
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Attention Dan Gribbin and MacApper:
Have you read all these consistently negative customer complaints about this program?
If so, why are you still giving this program a B+ rating?
How can you expect readers to rely on your review ratings if you do not revise them as negative reports and complaints flood in?
Respectfully, Nate
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Attention Dan Gribbin and MacApper.
Nate, in the previous post, raises an excellent point.
Would you care to respond?
Thank you.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Ok so, I am havibg the same problem as everyone else- its not communicating with itunes. Judging by the silence of the TidySongs team, this must be what they expect and basically- tough sh**.
They are making no effort to help or work a way through the problem. I want the program to work instead of a refund!!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Jessica: “I want the program to work instead of a refund!!”
Ha! Then good luck with that magic wand.
Have you read the suggestions above? For example, I bought Dupin and used it successfully. $15 I think. Or, there are other duplication eliminators that go over your whole hard disk, not just itunes.
Nate
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I was about to shell out the $39 for TidySongs as I was desperate to get my 1TB music library cleaned up. However, I am SOOOO glad I came across this site first. No $$$ coming out of my pocket!! Thx to all the feedback…I’ll try dupin or something else. If anyone has any other program suggestions please post.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Yeah, I purchased this monday and have tried for five days to get it to work. None of the functions work correctly — NONE. What a waste of forty bucks. I’m angry at myself that I didn’t spend the sixty seconds to Google this piece of trash.
The people that make this are criminals and should be jailed.
And the person that wrote this review — do you read the comments? Do you see that you gave a positive review to a product that is functionally useless and has ripped off everyone who posted here? What the FUCK is wrong with you?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Click “Contact” above and ask MacApper what their policy is. Here’s what I just wrote to them:
—————————————————
Have you seen the reports of dissatisfied users under your review of Tidy Songs at:
http://macapper.com/2010/02/15/tidy-songs-itunes-library-janitor/#comments
What is your policy on revising or revisiting a favorable review in light of numerous subsequent reports of total dissatisfaction with a product? When the product won’t work as described?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Tidysongs – waste of money. ‘iTunes not responding’ over and over. Tidysongs helpdesk not responding either. Cnuts.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Yeah! TidySongs is an easy and powerful program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicate songs and organize your music.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I’ve wasted both time and money to discover the following:
-TS claims to fix songs, but it doesn’t show in Itunes.
-Barely started TS claims Itunes freezes up, and I have to start it up again. Despite settings, it always starts from song 1 to freeze up again about halfway the first letter of the alphabet. No way it can reach Z.
As a result I got mad and cleaned my 11000 songs myself in a 36 hour non-stop session. A smart playlist showing all songs with missing art (Itunes can also filter duplicates and much much more.)
I’m reclaiming my money, since I can do it better and faster myself.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
Amateurish program at best… times out constantly, l have yet to get a full run of the program from start to finish…. not to mention its rather pricey and for what? “can be slow while working” is also an understatement… Waking up in the morning to see the “time out” error again and again… maddening… save your money folks. Or better yet check out tuneup… does everything but get rid of dupes…
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
One thing I didn’t learn about or realize until recently is that some websites accept placement payment from developers for reviewing their product.
They are supposedly paid for the review regardless of whether it is favorable or unfavorable, but they are paid.
Could that be why Macapper does not revise this review and their recommendation of Tidy Songs? Are the stuck with their original review and recommendation staying up because they accepted a “mention payment” from its developers or distributors?
Isn’t it normal for a website reviewer to reconsider their recommendation when there are so many reports of bad experiences with a product?
Can MacApper or Kelly at TidySongs answer this question?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
iTunes not responding!
I have a very large music collection. It is entirely clean and correctly tagged, I tried TidySongs just to clean up some of the Duplicates. I ran the test and it seemed to work fine, it found 21,000 duplicates (that is about right per my estimate). When I ran TidySongs to actually delete these duplicates it will freeze around the 30-35% stage and tell me iTunes is not responding. I tried this 4 times and waisted over 4 hours. No response from customer support after I submitted the error thew their system.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
I really wish I’d seen the reviews here before I shelled out my $39!
All I get is, “There was an error connecting to the TidySongs server. Please check your Internet connection and restart.” –yeah, I’m sure that’s the problem.
But like a fool, I give you the benefit of the doubt in hope that… I don’t know, a cockroach, a lighting storm, a program fluke, whatever, …screwed something up, but you’re totally on it… everything should be up and running again within the hour …right?
This hope appears to have been misplaced for several days now. Dear Kelly, the least you could do is respond to email. I’m not a stalker, but certainly angry enough to become one. Too bad I don’t have that kind of time to waste.
tidysongs is worthless, non-functional
kelly@tidysongs.com is unresponsive
December 28th, 2010 at 8:44 am
OK for everyone that is having the problems with it saying that itunes is not responding. I have done a debug of the program and ran this program on all windows XP, Vista, and 7. Seems to be that the problems is that the program is not fully compatible with windows 7, the easy fix on it all is to right click on the program and run as administrator and in compatibility mode of Vista Service Pack 2.
I am going around testing Itunes programs to see what is the best program out for the money, I still have a couple more to test before I come out with my article.
Hope this helps out with some people having problems.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
To Programming Tester:
It’s nice to know that you found a backhanded way to run this program on Windows, but since the name of this website is “MacApper” I think that those who run this website have an obligation to thoroughly test programs they review on Macintosh computers too before writing and maintaining a favorable review and recommendation.
don’t you?
And when they get as many complaints as here, shouldn’t they retest the program and reconsider their recommendation? Or at least re-write their review to take note of the problems purchasers have been having with the program?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Yes we do do testing for Mac apps also I do not do that testing it is another person that does it. there was a post earlier about windows 7 that I was referring to on my post, But I dont know for sure but I wonder if the problem for mac is the same that it is because the programmers have not updated it to the latest mac os.
And as for your last questions I fully agree about that if you are going to sell a product that is not certified for the latest OS then you need to tell people this. I look on there site and it says nothing about not being certified for any certain OS mac or windows. The program has a good idea but is not executed to the best. But more of that will be in my article when it is released.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
P Tester: “The program has a good idea but is not executed to the best. But more of that will be in my article when it is released.”
Be sure to take a look at a program called TuneUp which seems to work on a similar basis to Tidy Songs but actually works!
(I have no financial or other interest in TuneUp or any other program – just a user.)
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
I don’t want my money back- I want this program to work! The thing that really upsets me the most is that I had to scroll through pages and pages of Google to get to this site that gives me the real deal on TidySongs. I wish the folks at TidySongs were as good at writing programs as they are at manipulating Google so that no bad reviews come up in the top 1000 hits!! They are really good at preventing us from seeing what is wrong with their product and I bet they are getting richer by the minute, as you can see from the great “reviews” when you Google.
I have a Mac and have iTunes 10 and Tidy Songs goes along great for about five minutes and then crashes big time. A few other things I noticed:
1. You cannot empty the TidySongs App without jumping through a thousand hoops.
2. You cannot “quit” on the program- there is no “quit” key.
3. Once it starts not working because the “iTunes has stopped working” (I actually think it’s because the TidySongs has stopped working) you cannot restart it and you then have to dismantle it piece by piece starting with “airhelper” until you finally possibly delete the entire program.
I wish someone with computer savvy would put some of these negative review sites up front of Google so less people will get swindled.
4. In the meantime, like I said at the beginning, I wish this program would WORK- it has great potential!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Thank you.I hope I can improve through learning this respect. But overall, it’s very nice. Thank you for your share!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Kelly,
i tried the ‘trial’ version first and it fixed 103 songs.
now i let tidysongs ‘loose’ on my libary of 30k+ and it never completes. i always return to find it stopped with an error message such as “no internet connection founds”. this is complete turd. the internet is working fine. i have rebooted my machine sveral times and tidysongs always opens showing only 103 songs as fixed (from the trial) and does not shows the several thousand is fixed prior to crashing out.
i feel very frustrated with this error. i have submitted an error report but no response received back yet.
i have even uninstalled tidy songs and put it back on hoping this might fix the issue.
Jit.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Try Tune-Up. It works great for me.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
My library was a mess. Multiple folders, albums split between folders, music files continuously turning up missing… I bought the program, but I was getting this error message:
“TidySongs is not able to locate or access more than 75% of the song files in your iTunes library.”
The solution: sign out of my itunes account, turned off genius, stop music sharing, ping ect.
Then change the permisions on iTunes music folder ( select iTunes > Music > get info and change permissions at bottom [on Mac] ) to read write=everyone.
Walla! It seems to be working now… it’s on like song 400 with 6,800 more to go.
Hope it helps.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
itunes not responding error….
tidysongs is a waste of money, it literally does not work.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
This program has not worked since I bought it- had emails from Kelly to try various different things, new versions etc- still times out and says Itunes is not responding. I am waiting for a reply requesting a refund.
Cannot recommend this program as it did not work from the start.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
This app is TOTAL CRAP.
It pulled “duplicates” that were not even close in any way to other songs ((sheepishly-I have 80,000+ songs many of which are rare and obscure)
I went to the duplicates folder and found a plethora of original-one-of-a-kind recordings.
How can this be?
I want my money back.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
P.S.
THERE IS NO “UNDO” OPERATION. WTF?!
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
I guess, by accident, that I am the very rare “happy” exception on this list !
I did the perfectly “wrong” thing that seems to be right, in order to use this program successfully. I am using a 64bit “upgraded” version of Windows 7 to run this itunes “editor” , It does take a long time to run, but I haven’t seen ANY of the ERRORS with itunes freezing and lost connections. I am also running the latest 64bit version of itunes(10.1.22). I bought fixtunes long ago and then “reauthorized” TIDYSONGS,
this week. It seems to find many duplicated songs in my “messy” 24K song library that has been collected/combined from 5 computers in about 8 years.After reading the comments on this message list, I will look at the “duplicated” songs folder much more closely, but so far the results were good at cleaning up much of my messy song collection. Unlike MANY others, this program just keeps “chugging” and going through my collection, song by song!!
I will let you all know if I have some subsequent change of heart, but “so far, so good”. P.S. : I have not used any other(non-freeware) programs to do this job.
Sorry you are all having such problems! ( I am having similar troubles, but with MS OUTLOOK freezing, running under the 64bit WIn 7 OS)…
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
i subscribed to tidysongs and payed the fee.iv had my laptop repaired and a new hard drive put in and lost the application, how do i retrieve it without paying the fee again please
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
The problem i keep noticing is that it will eaither lose it’s connection from itunes or itunes will stop responding and that will terminate the program. The farthest ive ever gotten is about 76% in finding duplicates. Theses a couple things it might be i think. First my itunes is on an external drive however it is a USB 3.0 so it’s damn fast. As well im currently sitting on 62,000+ songs
Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Developer,
I had just bought tidysongs and am so frustrated because it works well, checks my library, creates a ‘fixed’ folder in Itunes but it DO NOT corrects nothing, and the fixed flder is always empty!
Can you help me sove that?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Doesn’t work ! I.e Apple script error avery time i try to edit genres.
Tunes up and dougscripts.com will do the job much better.
Money spent for nothing.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
just bought tidy song yesterday… was working for a little bit …then nothing… now it won’t even connect anymore? Does anyone has the same problem?
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
I am not happy with tidy song either. I spent $39 expecting to clean up my itunes, but have problem after problem. It has taken songs off of albums, given them different names, and put them onto other albums by different artists. I would not recommend this application to anyone, and may as well thrown my $39 down the toilet. I have only a small library of about 45 gigabyte (6500 songs) so not a big task.
Now i have to reset everything.
NOT HAPPY.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Don’t buy this software it is a fraud it can’t remove my duplicated songs I’m trying to get my money back