I recently bought the Mac version of Platinum Notes from the makers of Mixed in Key. Platinum Notes takes your music library and applies a bunch of filters to it to fix things like clipped peaks and low levels, it also adjust the pitch to make sure the song is correctly in key and fixes the levels so all your songs play at the same volume. You need a very powerful computer to fun this software, otherwise its going to take forever to analyze and correct your library. It took four and a half days to analyze 990 songs on my PowerBook G4 laptop with 2gb of RAM.

However, there is a serious flaw in the software, it will completely wipe out your ID3 tags unless you go through a complicated process of covering and renaming and redoing the tags BEFORE you run Platinum Notes. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either. After waiting four days for it to process I loaded the newly processed tracks into Traktor 3 to test out the sound quality, and guess what.. NO TAGS! The only information I had left was the tracks name and the artist. There was no key, no genre, no label, no remixer, no nothing other than the most basic information.

So where does this leave me? It leaves me with 990 tracks that I have no idea what genre most of them go in just by name alone. Im going to have to play each and every song and then edit the tags to fix Platinum Notes errors. It will probably take me an additional four and a half days to fix it.

Im most likely going to seek a refund for the purchase as I feel the software is incomplete, buggy and not functioning properly since it cant keep your track information in tact. If they were able to fix this problem and Platinum Notes was able to keep your information in tact after its work is done, then yes I would recommend this program to everybody, but until then, I suggest you save your money and wait till they either fix it or something better comes along.

Update #1 (2/18/09 9:20am):

I just got an email from the authors of Platinum Notes, and they are indeed working on fixing the tag problem for version 3.0. I am looking forward to the new version as I hope its able to fix the problems with the ID3 tags.

Update #2 (2/19/09 12:03pm):

I talked again with the authors of PN and they have advised me to give it  another chance and they provided me with some instructions on how to preserve the ID3 tags. Let me start by saying that it took forever to strip and re-stripe the ID3 tags (this computer is just not as bas ass as it used to be) into a format that they say should be compatible with Platinum Notes processing. So, I have started the process over again and I am once again waiting the four and a half days that it takes to process the library to see if it indeed comes through with all the original tag information intact. Update will be posted when the process is complete.

Update #3 (2/22/09 8:19am):

After running the library through Platinum Notes for a 3rd time, following the directions that they gave me, I have once again come up with the exact same results. Completely missing ID3 tags except for the basic information about Artist and Album. So Im giving up on this program for now, Ill keep an eye on it for future updates to see if these issues are resolved, because I feel that once they are resolved this will be a very powerful and useful utility for all DJ’s to have and to use. But until then, its just a toy and not worth the money or the time.