RealNetwork's Rinse Software Cleans Up iTunes

RealNetworks is shifting gears and heading a new direction. Instead of competing with iTunes as a content provider, it wants to focus on providing tools that help manage and distribute digital media. Most recently, it launched a program called Rinse that works with iTunes to cleanup and organize your playlists.

The software automatically adds album artwork, fixes song names, organizes by genre, and finds duplicate tracks. RealNetworks is touting it as being "smarter than other programs," even smarter than iTunes itself. The "intelligent database techology" can find artwork, remove duplicates, and organize songs even if the names are mispelled or incomplete. However, the program does need a little help if your collection consists vastly of vague names. The software needs at least one correctly spelled word from the artist or song name in order to do its job.

A message from its support page explains:

Rinse uses the information already in your file (such as the filename or existing tags) to look up your songs. The identification algorithm is complex and will compensate for missing information and misspellings. Rinse will extract the information from your songs and submit it to our Identification Server. The server will then return the correct song information, along with an accuracy level for the new information.

Rinse is priced at $39, but does come with a free trial that lets users fix up to 50 tracks. The price tag relegates it to a certain niche that must deeply care about the organization of their music collection. RealNetworks hasn't made an official announcement for the software yet, but it's ready for download from the product page.

[via GeekWire]