Make iTunes 6 Ways Better With Song Sergeant

I have a gripe with iTunes and iPhoto. They’re messy. True, both are good at storing songs and photos, respectively, but neither is good at cleaning up a mass mess of names.

In particular, I have trouble with iTunes, which I’ve used since the first version, and which now stores about 4,000 songs, over 1,500 from the iTunes Store. Problems? Duplicate songs, artists with misspelled names, songs that don’t match the album, and so on. Why doesn’t Apple provide some clean up utilities for iLife?

Clean Up

The problem stems from misnamed artist names, misnamed song titles, and more than a few duplicate songs; some of which came from CDs, others from albums on the iTunes Store.

There’s all that naming inconsistency in what amounts to a database of songs, movies, TV shows, and podcasts.

It can’t be that difficult for Apple to create a set of utility features that handle such database clean up chores. Until now, my method for clean up was, 1) run into a misspelled song or artist while browsing, 2) manually change the name of the song to make it right, 3) search for others to match my changes.

See? Manual effort for a computer database. Where’s the fun in that?

Song Sergeant Solution

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Sarge Sergeant obviously was developed to help iTunes users with the exact same problem. Whip a rowdy iTunes database into shape.

Tell me you’ve run into the same situation. You scan your iTunes collection, or search for specific songs or artists, and what pops up is a list—different names for the same artist, different names for the same song, duplicates and so on.

Fortunately, there are a few solutions to help fix that problem.

6 Step Boot Camp

If your iTunes database has the same heebie jeebies as mine, give Song Sergeant a try to help clean it up, shape it up, and make it clean, lean, and a mean song machine.

1. Find and remove duplicate songs from iTunes
2. Preserve playlists while removing duplicate songs
3. Identify misspelled artists, albums, songs
4. Discover orphaned songs unseen by iTunes
5. Merge song information from different songs
6. Automatic or manual control

That makes it seem easy. If it was so easy to correct such issues with an iTunes database then why didn’t Apple build it into iTunes?

Rent-a-Sarge

There’s one major issue with Song Sergeant. It isn’t needed that often.

A drill sergeant in boot camp takes recruits and molds them into soldiers. They don’t get molded again and again. So it is with your iTunes database.

Assuming you have the same problems as me, and assuming Song Sergeant fixes those problems, especially the ones that have been around for years, and your iTunes is clean and fresh, now what?

My obsessive compulsive self says this is great, but it’s not an ongoing need utility. Use it once, and it may be years before your iTunes database gets messy enough to use it again. Other than that, Song Sarge is a good tool to fix a messy iTunes.