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What to do with these Sync library ?dupes

My music is local on my mac, previously sync'd with iPhone Manually. I just started with Apple Music and turned on Sync Library on both my Mac and my phone.


I have a lot of "dupes" which look like this - one track has cloud with X through it ("Removed") and a second track has cloud with arrow ("Available for Download" - cloud status says "Purchased"). Both tracks play so when playing the album I get the double playback and all this mess needs to get cleaned up.


Looking at Get Info, the "Removed" track has location of the physical file in my music library, /Users/User/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music/Michael Jackson/Number Ones/07 Bad.m4a


The second instance of this track has location "Cloud". If I click the cloud download symbol to force the download, I get a physical file /Users/User/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music/Compilations/Number Ones/07 Bad.m4a (it's under "Compilations" instead of "Michael Jackson")


Just to make things even more complicated, on my iPhone these tracks are not duplicated, but it did create a duplicate album with different date (1987 instead of 2003) and shows tracks 5 and 6 under the 1987 album and removed them from the 2003 album. (So my Mac and iPhone are out of sync and neither one is right).


I can remove the download on the 2nd instance that just resets the status. Deleting it says it will delete it everywhere which I suspect will result in it being deleted from the phone as it only has one instance of the track. Deleting the first track I am loathe to do as that is the correct original physical file that I purchased.


There are other cases of whole albums treated like this or individual tracks, and some cases of albums duplicated. I have other issues in the rubble too but this seems like biggest problem to tackle first.



iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 30, 2019 11:52 AM

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3 replies

Nov 30, 2019 12:38 PM in response to turingtest2

ok that seems to work - I didn't delete the track in the cloud but did "Add to Library" on the first track, it showed the dotted cloud status for a few seconds then resolves itself and the second instance of the track disappeared. I'll close this thread and the earlier one you replied to for now, do some cleanup like this and see what problems remain.

What to do with these Sync library ?dupes

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