iTunes playlist making duplicates of itself

I suspect this happens whenever you add songs to your playlist. The next time you sync, duplicate playlists will appear on both your Mac and iPhone. I have been having this problem, so I tried it the music on my iPad Pro. It didn't duplicate the playlists. It only happens on the iPhone. It's been ongoing for a few years, and there are a lot of previous posts about this that are all past their use by date. I can't figure out why it's only doing it for the iPhone and not the iPad. There doesn't appear to be a solution.

Do you have either of the iTunes Match or Apple Music services? Did this happen when you synced a device? Is your library backed up by Time Machine or something similar. Playlists live in the iTunes Library.itl file. You can close iTunes, make a manual copy of the current file, then open iTunes and delete the duplicate playlists. Should something go wrong you can revert to the backup file.

tt2

iTunes isn't always included in Time Machine backups. Go to your Music/iTunes folder and then enter Time Machine to check that it is covered, or review your preferences for Time Machine in settings.

As long as you do all of the deletions in iTunes and then sync it should be fine. Avoid trying to clean up in multiple locations at the same time because that can lead to problems.

tt2

Ha ha ha. And Apple sent me a message saying I was one smart dude because the problem had been solved.

Big whoop.