Appletell reviews SongGenie by Equinux
by at February 3, 2009 7:39 am
Sections: Features, iPod, iTunes, Mac Software, Reviews
|
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Format: Download
Developer: Equinux
Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5+
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Price: $29.95
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 1.0.1
My favorite song, you ask? Oh that’s easy. Track 3 by Artist! That song was amazing.
Don’t let this happen to you. There is another way.
Thankfully, iTunes almost always avoids this problem. It’s to the point were incorrectly labeled songs are almost a thing of the past. When you rip a song from a CD using iTunes, it’s more or less automatically tagged with the correct artist and song information.
On some occasions, it may be necessary for you to pick between two or more album choices if iTunes can’t determine just what CD is inside of it. And even more rare is for iTunes to give up completely and make you do it yourself. That last case is where you’d need something like SongGenie.
SongGenie will find the correct ID3 tag information for your songs. Kind of. It won’t get every song you throw at it; the more popular the band, the better chance of it working. But then again, you’d likely have correct information already if they were famous right?
If you feed already tagged songs to SongGenie, you’ll find out it’s really picky. It looks at capitalization differences as being wrong. And honestly, I can’t think of a better way to do this; if you for some reason have strangely capitalized song names, then they need to be fixed. But what makes this bad is that SongGenie is not consistent in its capitalization scheme.
For instance. Do you capitalize every word in a song’s title (including words like “the”, “or”, “and” etc.)? Or do you type song titles exactly as they appear on the CD Jacket (even if that means all caps)? Ultimately, you have to make a choice, but SongGenie doesn’t. I’ve even had the software change its mind mid-album. That’s not good. Just take this advice. Don’t let SongGenie loose on your correctly tagged songs.
But even if you do, it’s not like you have to change anything. The application suggests corrections to your song information, and you can choose what you want to change. Maybe just the artist name, song title or album name. Well, I guess that’s all of your choices really.
If you have music from compilations, then you’ll want to be careful with the album names that are suggested. Sometimes, if the songs are significantly different (remastered, etc.) they will be recognized as from a greatest hits album or the like. But more often than not, SongGenie will attempt to rename every song based on the original album. But maybe you like that. I don’t.
What SongGenie is good for is tagging songs that you know are wrong. I had a few songs in my collection from a band named Sigur Ros (you may have heard of them) that weren’t right for whatever reason. SongGenie can fix that. But how many songs do you really have that are in dire need?
What I think Equinux should do is take SongGenie, throw it in a blender with CoverScout 3 and make one amazing program. They both fix your parts of your songs, so they really belong together. This way, if you didn’t need to fix your song information, you wouldn’t feel bad about buying the whole package because CoverScout 3 is still such a great album art fixer. And while I’m making suggestions, I’d really like to see lyrical information added to the things that SongGenie can fix. Lyrics are one of the hardest things to get correct in your song details, so that would be a great feature to have.
Buy SongGenie
Related Posts