Duplicate songs on iPhone 12 Pro Max after syncing

You would think, but no such luck. I do the same thing, backing up to the PC. I just have more info on my phone than the cloud would allow me to back up, so I just do it on the computer. I think I found a way around it though. I unchecked the "sync all music" box and synced my phone. Then I went to Settings-General-iPhone Storage. I hit the Music section and there's an All Music section and a thing for each artist. Next to the "Music" label above the all songs part is an edit button. I hit that and deleted all songs. They still showed up on the phone, but as downloadable songs rather than actually being in the phone. I synced my phone again after I deleted all of the songs and it put the songs in the right places with no duplicates. None that I've found anyway. I have over 10k songs, so I didn't check one by one. It put the songs in their rightful place instead of downloading them or putting in a duplicate where one is there and the other is a download. Give that a try and see if it works. I don't think you have to uncheck the sync music box since you don't have to sync it before you delete everything. Unless you have songs on there that you purchased but aren't on iTunes yet. Otherwise, just go into your settings, delete all your songs then resync your phone to iTunes. Its not ideal, but by that point, I was desperate and figured I'd give it a shot. Lo and behold, it worked. Hopefully it works for you!

Give my solution a try. I had the exact same problem. I'd uncheck sync music, but it would show I still had all of my music on there. Thing was, the listing of the song was on there, but I'd have to download it. Give it a shot. Next time you sync, uncheck the music you want to sync and sync your phone. Unplug your phone from the computer if its plugged in, delete all the music on your phone, recheck the music you want to sync and sync your phone. That should do it. Fingers crossed, of course.

Glad it worked for you! I do both. A lot of ripped songs, a lot bought on iTunes. It doesn't seem to matter whether its in a folder or from the iTunes store, it duplicated. I have no idea why, but at least there's a solution out there now. It would've been a massive headache going through song by song to get rid of them and then risk having them duplicated again when you sync..... Oof. Not sure why it hasn't been fixed yet on Apple's end. First time for me, but I've seen it happen for a while. Anyway, I'm rambling. Luckily its not too complex of a solution, just time consuming depending on how much music you have.

A couple of quick questions. Which iPhone are you using and when you deleted the music app, did you delete it from the icon on your home screen or in settings? If you delete the icon from your homescreen, it doesn't get rid of the info, just the icon itself. Like all the other apps that comes packaged with the iPhone, you're basically "hiding" the icon and not deleting anything. If you're on iOS 14.whatever, There should be an option in the same area that says "Delete App" in red. You can reinstall the Music app, then resync your music to your phone. It'll take a while with 400GB+, but that should do it. Looking at it now, there's a warning that says it "can't be undone". That's true, you can't just reverse it, but you CAN resync your iTunes library to your phone. Deleting it from your phone won't just delete it from iTunes because, as far as I'm aware, Apple doesn't have any wizards on the payroll. It could also be that your phone sees the 400GB, thinks about it for a minute and just "nope"s out. Start simple and work your way up. Restart the phone. If that doesn't work, do a soft reset. If THAT doesn't work, delete the music app from that same screen: Genereal-iPhone Storage-Music-All Songs. If you have any downloaded music on your phone that isn't on iTunes yet, download it to iTunes first. Otherwise you'll have to go through and download it on your phone and I would imagine hunting those down would not be fun either.

Huh. We have basically the same phone, so it should be working. I'm thinking maybe a soft reset would help. A soft reset is like force restarting a computer. Not sure how much you know about computers, but it basically clears the memory so whatever junk is in there gets dumped out. Nothing gets deleted or changes, it just gives your phone a...."cleaner", I guess, way of working so its not having to work passed all the stuff that might have built up in the memory. After you delete your music, is there music still there but with the cloud icon to redownload it or is your library just empty? Sorry if I end up asking any dumb questions. Since I can't see the screen, I just want to make sure I don't miss something on my end. You can try a soft reset and try deleting your music again to see if that clears anything up. If not, the only thing I can think of is, when you plug into iTunes, uncheck your music, sync it (which might take two attempts or more since that happens to me when I try to put new music on it), eject your phone then try deleting again. Or at least check the storage to see if its gone. If it is, plug it in and try resyncing your music. As a last resort, (and I mean LAST if we can't figure something out), would be to do a full reset of the phone. Back it up, reset, then restore it from the backup. But again, that's a hail mary, can't think of anything else, I'm going to punch a wall soon type option. Let's try a few other things first.