RealNetworks has announced Rinse, a music clean-up product that can "rinse iTunes music collections clean." It makes iTunes music collections much easier to browse, organize and enjoy by automatically cleaning up song duplicates, misspellings and missing album art that can plague collections, according to Peter Kellogg-Smith, RealNetworks' vice president of product marketing for emerging products.

Entire iTunes music libraries can be fixed with just a few clicks, he adds. According to analyst estimates, avid music collectors have an average of 3,500 songs in their digital music collections.  Duplicate songs, missing album art, and misspelled song titles and artist names make a music library disorganized and difficult to navigate.

RealNetworks, known for its extensive experience in digital media management, uses Gracenote's music recognition and identification technology and its media database to power Rinse.  The Gracenote Global Media Database contains more than eight million albums and 100 million tracks.

"Most music fans have acquired their digital music collections over several years, resulting in libraries that have inaccurate track titles, artists and missing cover art.  This hampers music navigation, both on your devices, desktop and in the car," says Gracenote Chief Technical Officer Ty Roberts. "We are pleased that RealNetworks is using our technology and database to keep the collections of music fans accurate and complete."

Rinse automatically looks up songs in the Gracenote music database and downloads the correct details for each song.  Users can choose to fix songs one at a time in order to see and edit the details before saving them or choose to fix songs automatically.

Rinse is a downloadable service available for US$39 at http://www.rinsemymusic.com/ and is compatible with iTunes collections on both Mac and Windows systems. A free trial version is available that cleans up 50 songs in a user's library.