SongGenie Review
There is nothing more frustrating that putting a music CD into your computer to find iTunes can not identify the album or song. A long list of “Title 1″ and a long time spent renaming ahead.Well SongGenie is a new application that claims to clean up your iTunes library and call an end to the “Title 1″ problems. How it apparently works is SongGenie constructs an acoustic fingerprint of each track and, based on specific characteristics, detects the appropriate artist name, song title and album title. Double Click the SongGenie icon to load the application and start the scan.
The application then automatically identifies tracks containing incomplete or incorrect information. It even detects music titles for tracks with no artist, album or song title information; titles that were digitalized without extra information and are therefore called, for example, “Title 01″ and additional characters that suggest incorrect names like an underline.
Using an acoustic fingerprint, SongGenie determines which track to work on and intuitively inserts the correct information in its user interface. With just a click, the appropriate description text is transferred to the track in question. One point worth noting is if you have moved your iTunes library from the default USER:NAME:MUSIC folder to the main drive you need to tell SongGenie the location of your iTunes library. This is easily added in the Preferences options.
I have at least one album issue with a Martyn Joseph album (see the screenshot below) it this will be a great test for SongGenie.
Impressively SongGenie was able to identify the songs from this 1995 Martyn Joseph album (that isn’t even easy to get now) album perfectly. To be honest I didn’t think it would work on slightly less mainstream music but it not only works but it works very quickly.
The application can cope with songs in different formats and if you imported albums to your library while offline, have a library dating back many years or simply have missing information in your music then this little application will come in very handy.
It would be great if it had the ability to also add the album art to the track but at present it can only cope with the text aspects of the song, Title, Album etc and to be honest I have more albums with missing art that I do tags. That said I did find on tracks with missing data it does seem to work well.
With new iTunes features such as ‘Genius’ it is important all the information about each track is present and correct. If you are anything like me with over 4000 songs in their library then SongGenie is going to improve the Genius experience no end. At under $30 it would be worth checking through your iTunes for gaps in your library and giving it serious consideration ?
Have you tried CoverScout? It is from the same company. It has no music finger printing, but if your music is already tagged correctly, CoverScout finds covers for it within a couple of seconds (usually plenty of these, you just have to pick one of the results). Actually it can even assign artwork automatically (you only need to tell it where to search for artwork and what quality level you demand at least) – however, I don’t trust applications that work too much behind my back. I guess it is only a matter of time till both products might merge into one product – finally they’ll only need to add the ability to actually play the media and what the h… do you need iTunes any longer? (other than maybe buying music in Apple’s store
I tried the free trail of this on some really easy tracks like the Jacksons and some stuff that is in the charts. It couldn’t find any of them. What a let down!!!
I tried the full version on my extense library and it seems to be very powerfull, I’m Catalan (the nation where Barcelona is) and our music is not known for the english but the program found a lot of their titles, album names and artists so I decided to buy it and I’m very happy to use it because works really good. Sometimes the server has some problems and can’t identify some songs but it’s a time trouble, a few menutes later the same song is recognized.
note:sorry if there a mistake on spelling but i’ve never studied english, mine is the street one in Spain.
Have a nice day
Is it App worthy to purchased?