May 2009Dogpatch-Based TuneUp Media Organizes MusicBy Gina PoggiWhen it comes to storing music collections, iTunes is a godsend. But if your collection looks like most peoples, it’s often filled with titles such as “Track 01,” “unknown artist” and an artist’s name spelled three different ways. This labeling chaos makes it difficult to navigate among songs, and is time-consuming to fix manually. That’s where TuneUp Media comes in. TuneUp Media, a small Dogpatch-based company, has designed an iTunes plug-in that automatically fills-in the missing information in a music collection: track names, artists, albums, and music genres. Consisting of 11 employees and seven contractors – including engineers, designers, and marketers – TuneUp is organizing music libraries all over the world. “We have people in over 200 countries using the TuneUp plug-in,” said chief executive officer Gabe Adiv. Adiv, a self-described huge music fan, helped launch TuneUp last July. “When the iPod came out it clearly revolutionized the way that we listened to and consumed music. At the same time it brought with it a slew of issues that hadn’t presented themselves before either. The biggest ones as we see it are bad music labeling. We created a plug-in for iTunes that cleans it all up automatically.” Thirty-five-year-old Mission District resident Milton Repreza used to fix his iTunes library by hand. Then he started using TuneUp. “I used to manually correct the genre and title track, and it would take such a long time. But with TuneUp I don’t have to sit there and waste my time typing in everything,” said Repreza. Adam Glickfield, a 31-year-old designer and Lower Haight resident, praised the services simplicity. “It integrates right in with my iTune. It’s a timesaver and helps keep me organized,” said Glickfield. The plug-in digitally listens to a track and takes an acoustic fingerprint – a song’s frequency – referencing it against a database of 70 million fingerprints. A match is made, and fed back to the user. The system is Mac and PC compatible, and opens up in a sidebar within iTunes. Users can drag songs from playlists to the TuneUp clean tab to correct track information. TuneUp offers a free version that provides 500 cleans and 50 cover art finds. Unlimited cleans and cover art can be purchased for a one-time fee of $20 with TuneUp Gold. In addition to the clean-up function, TuneUp offers a concert alert system that scans a music library and displays upcoming local concerts for every artist in a collection. It also has a Best of Web function, a valuable asset to the iTunes ecosystem that finds online news, videos, and more about user’s favorite musicians. “Lets say you’re listening to Led Zeppelin II, [the TuneUp plug-in] presents a live version of whatever song you might be listening to from YouTube as well as a Wikipedia bio and Google News and all sorts of other stuff on the artist,” said Adiv. Although TuneUp originally thought 18 to 25-year-old males would be their biggest market, the plug-in has attracted a wide age range of users, including the 40-plus crowd, who, in addition to having huge music collections, have more money to spend on the service. “Based on the overwhelmingly positive response we’ve received from the iTunes community, we’re now working hard to expand the program to other major media players,” said Adiv. For information visit tuneupmedia.com or email gabea@tuneupmedia.com. |
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