Apple music duplicated all the songs in my library

Hello OMGIJUSTNEEDANSWERS,

Thanks for visiting the Apple Support Communities and asking about Music on your Mac.

First, you should be able to find and remove your duplicates using this help article: Find items and duplicates in Music on Mac - Apple Support

You also mention "much lesser version" for the Music app, are you using the MiniPlayer? This article will help you disable this: Use Music MiniPlayer on Mac - Apple Support

The X in the top left corner should switch you back. Also verify you have Window for Music enabled. With the Music app as the main app (the word next to the Apple says Music) click on Window, and verify there is a check next to Music. This is also where you can switch or get out of the MiniPlayer too. Thanks and have a wonderful day.

i've had a ton of cleanup from this though not as bad as duplicating "all" my library. if that's what happened across the board you might need more help but just some suggestions from my experience and others who helped me on here. Though it may depend what statuses these dupe'd tracks are in and you may have some different cases going on.

see this thread, https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250903617

I had a large number of albums with all or some duplicated tracks. The solution was to select the item in "Removed" status and right click then Add to Library. This forced the track into the cloud, and the resolved the pending download item. Why it got into that state I can't say but forcing Apple Music to resolve worked in this case.

I also had examples of albums duplicated by Apple Music I think it has issues matching tracks with french accents in artist names like Beyonce and freaks out. Some of these cases I just deleted the duplicate version. In Finder under your Music Library there is a folder for Apple Music, the only thing that should be in there from what I can tell are items you "added" through Apple Music i.e. you don't really own. if Sync Library is creating stuff here for things you already owned, that is a problem.

Another weird problem was albums duplicating on my phone, with some tracks in one album and some in another. But still one album on my Mac. I eventually traced this back to the songs having some inconsistent album data in particular some songs in an album had the "Compilation" checkbox flagged some did not. I had a bunch of stuff physically in Finder in my music directory under "Compilations" instead of the artist. Making this checkbox consistent for the entire album cleaned up the physical location and resolved the dupe album on the phone (almost instantaneously). No idea when this issue came about, at some point iTunes/Music must have changed their paradigm to store under Compilations instead of Various Artists and things got inconsistent along the way.

Bottom line is a lot of the issues I have been able to resolve by either deleting a song/album or doing Add to Library with the proviso that you do not want to delete anything which is part of your "owned" library. I have spent a lot of time going Get Info then going to File tab to see the Cloud status and physical file location for a song to see what is up.

I also found out the following:

1. A lot of times when Apple Music got confused or stuck, signing out and back into your apple ID on the Mac would force it to recheck your library and cleanup issues. Also you can force an update through File>Library>Update Cloud Library. And you can restart Music and it will do an update library when it restarts. I don't know if these 3 actions are equivalent.
2. The best view to figure out the state of your library is "Songs" and then go to View>Show View Options and turn on the Cloud Status field which gives english description of what the cloud icon is meant to say but I found cases where the icon was missing but the cloud status was more helpful, and you can properly sort on this description but the cloud icon is flakey. This is what I used to resolved the "Removed" items in this view I selected everything in this status and did Add To Library. A lot of stuff resolved itself, I was left with some items stuck in Waiting status, and had to do a bunch of force updates and it eventually cleared (maybe Apple had issues at that time causing backlog).

Hope this helps. I was frustrated also as I don't think the cases in my library would be particularly unique so why all the Removed/Pending/Waiting/Dupe mess, but have managed to work through and resolve most of it.

If you're still stuck you can also a chat with Apple Support though my experience has not been great so far - of 3 cases I raised each was transferred 3 times (usually after "Sign out and back into your apple ID" did not work), and not resolved.

to clarify on my point 1 near the end when I say sign out of your apple id this is just for Music, under Account > Sign Out not thru Settings.