iTunes clean-up/add-ons help

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Temporary_User

Once all said and done, Pollux probably didn't work for 12% of my songs. (300 out of 2450)
Not too bad considering some of my music is not really "mainstream", but I've noticed some that you would definitely think it should have found.

I’m noticing the Pollux is not quite as good as it first appears. It works on a per-song basis, and doesn’t seem to take the claimed source album into account. For example, Jazz Masters is a 60 CD or so compilation of Jazz organized by artist, but Pollux frequently breaks the compilations into multiple source albums I’ve never heard of (because the individual tracks were no doubt culled from other sources), wreaking havoc on what was a fairly well organized section of my library.

Not a huge deal overall, because it builds a playlist that you can inspect the results for, and it supports undo, but overall I found it less useful than I had hoped, and much more labor intensive than I wanted. I was spending as much time overseeing the results as I would have spent simply tagging and cleaning up manually.

I also found it hangs on a fairly regular basis when doing large batches of music.

Overall, I think it has tremendous potential, and would be useful to tighten up single albums, but its definitely not something you fire-and-forget against your entire library.

[Temporary_User]

^ I found it was really hit or miss when it came to compilations.
Since all of my songs are just individually downloaded, I tend to only have 5-10 songs from each artist and from a wide range of their albums.
What I didn't like about pollux is that for many of those songs it would file them under the artists "greatest hits" album. Not that big of a deal, but I would rather look at and know the original album it is from.
It also files many songs under soundtracks, again not that big of a deal, but when you have multiple songs from the same soundtrack and differing artists, it doesn't always mark the album artist down, so that was something I had to do manually, so when I open that soundtrack album, it shows me all the songs from different artists instead of treating each song as being in a different album with the same name.

Overall, I probably would spend the $10 on the year subscription again if I had to do it over. I always have been pretty anal about my tags, before leaving them just "ARTIST - SONGTITLE", so what paying for pollux did, was get me off my lazy as s and it will now be easier to keep it tidy as I continue to add new songs in.