PerfectTunes suite

Hi Members,

I am a user of both dbPowerAmp and AssetUpnP, and am relatively satisfied with these solutions. They help me quite easily rip my cd’s, find the accompanying albumart and enable me to tag the files the way I have developed for myself.

Recently I noted some new products are to be developed by dbPower and are now available in Beta (meaning it is not the official release yet, but it is a working version of the software that can be used, but could still contain bugs and / or errors). The new products are available (free for the Beta versions) under the software suite “PerfectTunes” (PT) and contain:  PT_AccurateRip, PT_AlbumARt and PT_DeDup. The software is only available on the Windows platform; there is no mentioning of future availability for IOS on the website. I tested all the 3 components for a few days and thought to write down my quick findings:

AlbumArt:

This tool is to help us find, generate and optimize albumart. By telling the tool which place your albums are stored, it starts checking them. AlbumArt support the popular standards like mp3, AIFF, ALAC, WAV and FLAC. The analyses in my particular case (3000+ albums) take some 30 minutes. It than comes up with various reports/customized filters like missing albumart but also one with “album art with low resolution”. Each time the user can click to automatically have Album Art fix the omissions. In my case I apparently had some 1900 (!!) albums with low resolution art. AlbumArt can than suggest better quality album art. One can also choose the sorting for the albumart results.

The analyses process took some 30 hours running on a laptop with average performance and where the files are on a wired QNAP NAS. Very long processing time; on the other hand, the results are good and AlbumArt suggests the right art in 90% of all cases. What I think happens, is that AlbumArt searches the web on Artist/AlbumTitle e.o. and comes back with all its high quality findings which it than suggests using. I can see that the Internet traffic is intense; probably this causes the long processing time. On top, if you ask AlbumARt to automatically adjust the art, it of course writes back every single FLAC/WAV/AIFF file applicable!

De-Dup:

De-Dup searches your collection for duplicates songs (NOT albums). It works very well. After the search, De-Dup comes up with various overviews with exact matches and probable matches. It is to the user to – case by case – confirm an exact match in case the duplicate record will be deleted. One can choose which duplicated record is actually deleted. In my case I had 3 or 4 albums doubled, by accidentally ripping and loading them twice. I one case I had ripped an album both in FLAC and mp3, where I deleted the latter. Furthermore I have over 350 duplicated songs, but I choose to leave them as is. Some songs are available on various compilation albums, or sometimes a performer has a particular song on more of his/her albums. I personally choose not to affect an album’s record-content since I believe records are put on an album on purpose.

AccurateRip:

AccurateRip compares your ripped tracks against other peoples rips; a positive match says without question your rip is error free, a negative match can (!) also inform the rip has errors. The negative match itself does not solve an inaccurate rip; it just might trigger you to re-rip your CD. Again, the analyses come with various filters and sorting options.  AccurateRip indicates ripping errors on record level. I had a few. Some songs I haven’t been listening to for a while had errors. When I auditioned them, only in a few cases I could hear something was not ok, so I re-ripped.

Conclusion: I think all 3 modules are worthwhile using from time to time to maintain an electronic music library. I’ll keep using them, although I only start processing while I am on holidays for a few days :-)

Cheers,

Iver