Duplicate songs on iPhone 12 Pro Max after syncing

I just got my phone and, after setting it up, tried to restore it from a backup. It kind of worked, but most of the music was still missing. Since I didn't want to go through the thousands of songs I have and redownload them one by one, I decided to sync my phone on iTunes. After syncing, Music shows one album, but every track is duplicated under the same album. Two track ones, two track twos, etc. I checked to see if one was a cloud file and the other was actually on the phone, but every one I tried, both songs were on the iPhone and I didn't have to download anything. I tried restarting both the computer and iPhone and resyncing, that didn't work. I checked the duplicate songs on iTunes option in iTunes and yes, those are duplicated, but there are thousands more that don't show up on iTunes as duplicates but was put onto the phone as a duplicate. If it comes down to it, I'll remove all of the music and just resync and hope it doesn't duplicate again. But if it happens in the future, it would be nice to have a solution. Thanks for any help you can give me!

Windows, Windows 6

Posted on Nov 17, 2020 3:05 AM

Top-ranking reply

cp53x11

Level 1

8 points

Posted on Mar 5, 2021 8:32 AM

Success!

I unchecked "Sync Entire Library" when I plugged the phone to the PC to sync with iTunes library.
This reduced my on phone music to the original 70% of what was carried over when I set it up as a new device-copied from old phone.
Then I went to Settings>General>iPhone Storage>Music-Edit All Songs-Then Delete all songs. With only 200ish GB, it deleted straight away leaving the phone with zero songs.
Plug back into PC and resync library to a clean phone. All there, zero duplicates.

Thanks for your help gpd461!!

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51 replies

turingtest2

Level 10

278,179 points

Mar 6, 2021 3:17 AM in response to cp53x11

Once artwork is out of whack resyncing rarely helps. See this post on erratic syncing for a suggested approach.

tt2

gpd461 Author

Level 1

34 points

Mar 6, 2021 12:59 PM in response to cp53x11

In that case, I’ll refrain from celebrating also. At least we got one problem solved. Another hopefully on its way to being fixed.

gpd461 Author

Level 1

34 points

Mar 25, 2021 11:58 AM in response to Tamseg

Have you tried my solution? That's the only thing I came up with when I was messing around trying to figure out how to fix it.

Apr 25, 2021 9:29 AM in response to gpd461

'HELP' Ive done what you said and the albums seem to only have one song each but the cover pictures are all mixed up!!!

May 7, 2021 12:00 PM in response to BadCompany156

Problem is that the sync goes crazy and the artwork is rather useless - Tom Jones on a Branderburg concerto . - AND you have to change the one by one -

Nov 19, 2020 4:14 AM in response to gpd461

I have the same exact issue. It's maddening. I think the solution is going to be syncing the phone with the "sync music box" unchecked and then re-syncing with that box checked so it removes all the music files on the phone and then reinstalls everything from the iTunes Media folder. I don't back up to the cloud, I back up onto my PC. This happened to me once before years ago and I recall this is what I had to do to get things back in order. You would think there would be some type of check so this can't happen. The most frustrating thing is the time involved. I can't leave without the phone so I'm stuck while this all happens. Continuing my love/hate relationship with technology...

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Duplicate songs on iPhone 12 Pro Max after syncing