An app that just arrived on the Mac App Store on Thursday could help improve your initial iTunes Match experience, thanks to a host of features it includes for cleaning up your iTunes library. A clean collection with plenty of accurate metadata is probably easier for Apple’s Match servers to handle.

TuneUp is actually a suite of tools, including Clean, Cover Art, DeDuper and Tuniverse. The first three will be of particular interest to people with huge, unwieldy iTunes libraries dreading the iTunes Match scan and upload process. Here’s a quick look at what they do:

• Clean. Fixes mislabeled tracks and fills in missing song info, using “acoustic fingerprint technology” that actually uses the track itself as the basis for filling in track information, which it retrieves from the same Gracenote MusicID database that iTunes itself uses when you rip tracks into iTunes from CDs.
• Cover Art. Scans your library and finds all cover art, including multiple choices for each, in a convenient tool that lets you approve each selection individually or save them all at once. Great if you’ve got a lot of obscure music that isn’t available on Apple’s own iTunes Store, and want to have cover art show up in iTunes Match uploaded tracks.
• DeDuper. If you own a lot of “Best Of” albums or compilations, or you’ve had a bad transfer of an existing library from one Mac to another, you may have a lot of duplicate tracks. This third tool included in TuneUp Goes through and finds duplicates, then presents you with a convenient list of potential duplicates so that you can review each and make sure a rare live bootleg isn’t deleted by accident. Also, TuneUp’s DeDuper uses “acoustic fingerprinting,” just like the Clean feature, so it goes deeper than just surface information like track and artist name.

The final component of TuneUp, called Tuniverse, is an intelligent sidebar that displays upcoming concert information, bios, tweets, YouTube videos and other content related to the artist you’re currently listening to, as well as providing sharing options for Facebook.

TuneUp has been around for a while, but it has celebrated its Mac App Store availability with a sale of 20 percent off the regular sticker price for a lifetime subscription. That makes the whole bundle just $39.99 for a version you can install on multiple Macs, instead of the standard price of $49.95 for a one-computer license. Plus, it’s a timely arrival for a tool that could clear up some confusion as you move your library to the cloud.

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