14 DAY TRIAL // iTunes is, without a doubt, a great piece of software. However, as the old saying goes, what is meant for everybody, is meant for no one, and, because of the decision to make iTunes accessible to everyone, Apple left out the more advanced tools that could have been in the program. Fortunately, there are always third party developers that come to fill in these gray areas left by Apple, a good example of this being iTunify.
What it does iTunify is a small but complex tool that offers advanced options that deal with tweaking your music files. Much like its name that is a union of iTunes and 'Unify', it aims to make it easy to bring all your music tracks to the same level without you actually having to do any of the dirty work.
In term of actual functionality, it mostly deals with the metadata found in music tracks, such as the tags and artwork, as well as keeping everything orderly by locating duplicate files and making the management of very large libraries easy.
Working with it iTunify is tightly integrated with iTunes, and works side by side with it? literally. The iTunify window is always on top of all other windows, and it only holds the functions it performs. To actually make any use of it, you must also be in iTunes, because all the actions available are performed on the currently selected iTunes tracks.
This approach is a little strange initially, especially when you first open up the program, because you see all the buttons and fields, but no selection to work with. After a few minutes of messing around with it, you get used to using the two programs side by side and it all comes natural.
All of the things iTunify does are grouped into three tabs, labeled "Edit Tags", "Import & Export" and "Miscellaneous". We'll look at each in turn.
Editing tags Here you can make changes to the tags of all your music files. At the top of the window are the check boxes that tell the program which part of the tag you want to work on. You can select one or more tags to work on at any given time.
The first operation available is 'Find and Replace' this works as you would expect and is identical to the function found in most text processors. You can use regular expressions, if you know how, to make the search very precise, and you also have the mandatory 'case sensitive' option.
The second option is 'Change Case' which is very nice, since almost any library has several types of capitalization. With this tool you can unify them into one common capitalization, regardless of what that may be. The smart option here is great, as it will preserve things like "McCartney" which would normally be turned into "Mccartney" by a strict word caps algorithm.
Last but not least, you can swap tags around, or simply duplicate them, which is very handy for music imported with programs other than iTunes that do not respect the tag conventions. Swapping the artist and album tags between them is simply a matter of selecting the two tags from the drop down menus and clicking a button. Very nice indeed.
Import & Export Here you can export or import the tags and artwork of tracks, for easy editing in other applications. This is great for unifying the size of the album artwork, or toning it down so that it takes up less space on your iPod and shows properly on the tiny screen. The most important thing in working with these two functions is to make sure that the order of the tracks is maintained. To make the most out of these options your best bet is creating a special playlist to which to work with, and less prone to changing.
Miscellaneous Here you find several options that deal with managing the tracks directly. You can opt to remove tracks, find duplicates and invert the checkmarks of the current selection.
While nothing particularly life changing, these options can make the difference when you need them, simply because iTunes itself does not offer the functionality.
The Good Lots of handy options that make working with large amounts of files easy. Nice integration with iTunes, and a clean interface.
The Bad The documentation that comes with the program focuses too much on looking good and too little on offering actual information. It is pretty poorly structured and sparse.
The Truth This program offers many functions that are absent from iTunes. While they are without a doubt 'power user' tools, they do the job remarkably well, and are very flexible, and customizable, thanks to the templates.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
