iTunes iCloud purchase music duplicated in my Mac's library

Hi,

If you are using Apple Music &/or iTunes match, go to preferences and turn off iCloud Music Library. Genius file will be deleted. Now sign out of iTunes Store and close iTunes. Reopen iTunes and sign back into iTunes store. You will get a message about Purchases. Next turn iCloud music library back on.

Jim

Try the first paragraph of Duplicate songs in iTunes - Apple Community. This seems to work for some, for others the duplicates may come back. Clearly there is something not quite right at the moment with the way that cloud content is aligned with local content so that only the content that isn't downloaded is shown with cloud links. In my case this got rid of all but 20 duplicates which I can live with for now.

tt2

So, I cannot explain this one. Here's what happened to me. I found the exact same situation this morning. I conducted an experiment on one album by checking each duplicate song and deleting them. It wiped out the whole album! So I go back to the iTunes store, find the album and "ADD" it back. Next I return to my library and find the album has returned with no duplicates. Low and behold I find all of the duplicates on every purchased album/song are gone. Back to singles the way it should be. Why? How? I have no idea.

I'm having the same issue, and it just recently started happening. iTunes wants to download purchased music that has already been downloaded...and I can't seem to get it to stop doing that...and it's propagating out to almost all my iTunes-purchased music...and a few movies...the only work-around for me has been to delete it completely and then go to my account and re-download the whole thing all over again...which is a pain.

I've logged out of my iTunes account and back in again and that didn't provide any help either. I'm at a loss for what has caused this, or how to rectify it.

Example:

I have the same issue. I called Apple mac tech support last weekend. They couldn't tell me why this is happening. But from what I am reading when I google search this topic. Its happening a lot. What is strange about this issue with my Mac iTunes library. All of my duplicate songs are music I have purchased from iTunes. All of the music I have imported into iTunes from CD's and MP3's was not duplicated. Only iTunes purchased songs were duplicated. I am not a Apple music subscriber. I am a iTunes Match subscriber. All of the music that I have imported into iTunes and matched, and in the iCloud was in perfect order.

What is even stranger. On my IOS devices (iPhone - iPad) in the Music App. No issues with duplicate songs. My music library of purchased music from iTunes was perfect on my IOS devices. It did not show any duplicate songs in my music app across all of my devices. The issue of duplicate songs was only in my iTunes app on my iMac. My iPhone and iPad music was in perfect order.

I have spent the last 6 days and still working on the issue to remove the duplicate songs from my iTunes library. I am having to do it manually and almost 80% done. I am sure Apple support knows about the issue. Don't think they have a fix. Apple support tells me the next MAC OS will no longer have the iTunes software.

I'm having this exact same issue on my MacBook Air running High Sierra. Most of my albums look like this:

It's so incredibly frustrating! And I've been dealing with this issue for a good 2 or 3 years now, with the latest version of iTunes installed. Any kind of fix would be greatly appreciated, come on Apple!!!

And if I try to play the 'cloudy' versions, they don't play, they need to be downloaded first. And when I click on 'check for available downloads', iTunes just downloads all of the 'cloudy' duplicates locally onto my machine. I delete said duplicates and they just come back again, as cloudy as they were before lol.

YES. Exactly as you said. I am doing what you said verbatim for every purchased song from iTunes. And so far. It is working perfect. All my purchased iTune music is restored, and the duplicates are gone.

I dont know why its not working for you. it worked for me.

Weird. All my imported music into iTunes was not duplicated. All my iTunes purchased music was duplicated.

This method seems to have done the trick for me! Thanks Jimzgoldfinch!