As a person who bought a lifetime license, I have not yet upgraded to version 3 as automagic seems like a disaster in the making, I don’t want your software automatically doing anything from the start without my permission, I need control over how the auto part of the software operates completely.
I have remained on version 2.4.6 and will continue to do so and will get very little value fro my tuneup purchase unless you iron the auto ness and lack of control in version 3 on startup ? please don’t make the errant decision of dumbing down the software to the extent i wont use it because I cant get control over what its doing ?
My library was organised using version2 in a largely manual and overlooking the software actions ways and I don’t want V3 going back over stuff already done and auto correcting it without my say so, on my itunes library ? its bad enough that apple keep making itunes worse (10.6 to 11 was an abortion of gross simplification and dumbing down), I dont need you making your software any worse as well.
The kind of auto i like is where it does its best to judge things and then offers me the choice of the corrections to the item in question and I can select which bits I think the AI in tuneup has made a good decision on ? as most of my library is now organised. also CDDB gracenote etc is full of errors sadly that are very difficult – as a user to get corrected. companies that don’t leverage the contributive power of the users own AI, are wasting a possibly valuable resource.
The parts of your software I do use >
I use the clean tab and its sublevel clean tab pretty exclusively
I might use deduper or find artwork if it didn’t even 2.4.6 give the impression its going to auto remove the duplicates, or auto correct the artwork you want description that describe what user control is available, does deduper auto delete ? i don’t want to run it, as I don’t want it to auto delete anything. is it finding absolute duplicates named duplicates does it check for bit-rate duplicates and select which is the better quality ? where are my controls as a user over this ? In fact autopilot features in 3 should all be completely disable-able and when running auto have two modes / control over it, mode one that requires full confirmation for changes , per album confirmation or no confirmation ie full auto, that will give the user full control, ok supposedly your app has the ability to undo its actions but in a way i don’t like the idea of the app keep track of every action it does so it can then undo it, sounds unnecessarily complex, I am using other apps sometimes to get track orders and rename files and do some basic metatag changes before putting through tuneup, as some tracks are to rough for tuneup to get right without external manual intervention, usually where the tracks are labelled track1 track 2 etc and its only the folder that has the album name and info necessary to label the tracks correctly, obviously their cddb track timings should resolve this kind of stuff but sometimes some manual work has to be done which I don’t mind, but I would concentrate efforts on making it find info for the some of the worse mp3 files where maybe the only pre-existing tag info is track timing length and the fact their in the same folder together.
Tuniverse is a wasted programming effort for my use . I’m not interested in apps using cpu cycles or bandwidth wasted on features that endlessly want to use those resources without my permission for non core features, if i want to find concerts and venues i will do that by other means, don’t try to become some one stop shop platform thing, every useless app and website are trying that diversification jig and its irritating, and it divides your strengths.
Where to spend your programming energy>
KISS> ie spend your energy on the core features of the product, until it feels fast smooth, accurate and polished. then I will be able to recommend it to everyone. I would prefer all your effort to go into making the results better quality, the quantity of tracks that can be dragged & cleaned at once in the clean panel without crashing to be maximised etc. the deduper to offer to remove the lower quality duplicate, or the artwork finder to offer to replace a lower quality artwork with a better on for that matter offering full size, side by side artwork comparisons as sometime larger is more compressed or blurrier and not alway better quality etc, AI will find it hard to determine image quality truthfully other than analysing file size dimension and compression which dont always tell the whole story ? The opportunity for user to contribute to corrective information something that is now daftly difficult with cddb, as so many variants of CD’s have come out with track listings, it might be better for tuneup to prefer to 2 or 3 possible album tagging for a set of tracks ? certainly I like the auto part of the software to offer corrections rather than just going ahead and doing them. Also I want a way to mark tracks to be ignored by tuneup after its come across them, as they maybe tracks I’ve created, user content obscure website podcasts etc other stuff that will be impossible for tuneup to correct as it doesn’t exist in any database etc.