TuneUp Clean is a powerful tool, and like many powerful tools, it requires time and computer resources to do its job well. The larger your collection, the longer it will take, but here are some best practices that can help you clean your entire collection accurately and in a few simple steps.  For most users, we think these best practices will yield good results... try it out and let us know!

1. Clean the "Dirtiest of the dirty" songs

This is accomplished by following the instructions for Using 'Analyze' to Clean Your Collection. You will need to enable Create Playlists in your Preferences first. Using Analyze as a first step will isolate the "dirtiest of the dirty" songs within your collection relatively quickly, and you should clean the playlist created by this process first.  This step also ensures that you have a good "Artist Name" for your songs, which is required for the next step.

**NOTE: Windows/iTunes users cannot drag playlists from iTunes.

For Windows Media Player (WMP) users, you right click within your WMP library and "send to TuneUp" instead of "dragging and dropping". 

2. Sort By Artist

After you have Cleaned the "dirtiest" songs using Analyze, we suggest that you sort your entire collection in iTunes by Artist.

3. Drag and Drop, Clean By Artist(s) at a Time

After you have sorted your collection by Artist, simply start dragging and dropping an artist (or multiple artists) at a time, starting at the top and moving down.  We believe this is the best way for those of you with larger collections to Clean your collection in logical "chunks".  This is a good strategy for tackling your entire collection for a number of reasons:

• By dragging an Artist at a time, the "Search" process is short enough that you can get reasonably quick results and then have time to review the results as needed.
• By Cleaning an artist (or mutiple artists) at a time, TuneUp is going to be more accurate at returning correct Album level information. This is because we will always know if you have multiple songs from a certain album.
• With Create Playlists enabled, you will create an alphabetical "history", in playlists. These are all stored in a folder called "TuneUp: Cleaned". If you decide to clean your collection in multiple sessions, you can easily stop, come back later, and refer to these playlists to see where you left off. 
• There is a strong visual cue from iTunes to TuneUp and it becomes very intuitive to see the correlation between what you have dragged over from iTunes and what TuneUp is selecting as the correct information.  

• If you don't have a lot of songs by certain artists, its simple just to drag and drop multiple artists at a time, and it is still quite quick and intuitive to check the results and save them.