Corripio: Make Your Music Complete

Not everyone likes the idea of buying DRM’ed music; some people (myself included) still enjoy shopping for good ol’ CDs. But the trouble comes when it‘s time to load it onto my iPod. Things like album artwork and ID3 tags are usually missing, and if you want lyrics, good luck with that. Thankfully, Corripio attempts to change all that.

Corripio is an open source music manager that can fetch high-quality artwork, fix your ID3 tags and add lyrics to your music. To save you precious time, it is also smart enough to figure out where your iTunes library resides. It lists all your music at startup, allowing you to quickly manage and make changes. A great start!

The second thing you’ll notice is the interface. It is both beautifully simple and simply beautiful at the same time. To ensure that it looks good in Front Row or on an Apple TV, only high quality artwork is fetched (500×500 pixels) from places like the iTunes Music Store and Walmart.

Unfortunately, my hopes for fixing ID3 Tags were let down as it’s only limited to correcting capitalization, removing unwanted characters and getting the track number from filename (if it exists). Nope, it doesn’t correct or add artist/album information. Getting lyrics is also fairly limited to a handful of songs; I couldn’t find lyrics for most of my music.

A plugin architecture for languages like PHP, Ruby and Perl is available for those who want to add more functionality. On the whole, Corripio is a very useful tool that is still in its infancy. It does require a bit more work with lyrics and tags, but it’s certainly turning into a promising application. You can download your copy for testing from nClass Software.

While we’re on the topic of music collections, here’s a question for MacApper readers. I’d like to know: Is your music nicely organized with album art and tags, or is it a complete mess?