When playing music this morning, I noticed the recently played playlist on my Mac was double counting tracks. In the screenshot below, you'll notice that there's both a local version and a Stream MPEG-4 audio version in the playlist. Any idea what's going on?
I tried updating my iCloud Music Library, restarting, and still have these. Things seem to play OK, but I'm worried about library corruption.
iMac 27″, macOS 10.14
Hello mikelach2,
Thanks for reaching out to us for support. It's never fun when you have duplicate audio tracks in your library, and we are going to do everything we can to help you. When you have a free moment, can you please tell us when you first encountered this issue and if you have made any changes to the settings on your Mac or to your audio library? Also, can you please tell us all the troubleshooting steps you have taken so far in an attempt to resolve your issue so that we can avoid repeating them? When possible please be specific when describing the steps you’ve taken and the outcome after each step. Lastly, please tell us the version of macOS you are currently running on your computer, and check out the links below for resources that can potentially help to resolve your issue.
Find out which macOS your Mac is using
Find duplicate items in Music on Mac
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities.
Cheers!
Hello mikelach2,
Thanks for reaching out to us for support. It's never fun when you have duplicate audio tracks in your library, and we are going to do everything we can to help you. When you have a free moment, can you please tell us when you first encountered this issue and if you have made any changes to the settings on your Mac or to your audio library? Also, can you please tell us all the troubleshooting steps you have taken so far in an attempt to resolve your issue so that we can avoid repeating them? When possible please be specific when describing the steps you’ve taken and the outcome after each step. Lastly, please tell us the version of macOS you are currently running on your computer, and check out the links below for resources that can potentially help to resolve your issue.
Find out which macOS your Mac is using
Find duplicate items in Music on Mac
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities.
Cheers!
mikelach2,
Thanks for letting us know and for giving the previous troubleshooting steps a try.
At this point, we recommend that you Contact Apple Support using the link below so that they can help you find a solution to the issue that you’re experiencing.
Cheers!
Thanks for responding.
I'm running Apple Music 1.1.5.74 and macOS 11.4.
I've played music, and then done File -> Library -> Update iCloud Library.
I played an album again this morning, and got a similar result. It plays fine, but the Recent Played smart playlist shows two entries for each track played, one with iCloud status "removed" that is linked to the local copy of the Apple Lossless file, and another with the proper (old) iCloud status of either "uploaded" or "matched". The removed items are still in the Finder at the proper location.
The issue started Friday 6/4 at some point, seemed to resolve itself after a restart and Update iCloud Library on Saturday, but is now happening again, as you can see in the screen shot from this morning.
My hunch is that there's been some server side changes due to the coming release of Apple Music Lossliess and Spatial Audio, and either a bug in that work or some longstanding corruption in my Apple Music Library data that's generating this issue.
It's a very large and old Apple Music Library—I've been using iTunes since it came out, but always updating and backing it up appropriately. I do have a lot of lossless files from ripped CDs over the past decade or so of playing music.
Thanks for any insight you can provide.
Hi there, thanks.
I'm comfortable with finding duplicate tracks and removing them, generally.
In this case, I'm not so sure. Below is a screenshot of the recently played items that are duplicates. The first one (Clarity by Jimmy Eat World, 31.7 MB, Apple Lossless format) is linked to /Media/iTunes Media/Music/Jimmy Eat World/Clarity/12 Clarity.m4a, is listed as removed from iCloud, and has also been removed from any playlists it was on. The second one (Clarity by Jimmy Eat World, 9.5 MB, AAC audio format) remains on playlists, but is not visible in the Finder, and is in a degraded format than the lossless original. I'm happy to replace an AAC file in the Finder with an ALAC file and use Get Info to re-find the track, but that won't work in this case since the AAC version doesn't have a visible corresponding file in the Finder.
I'm not sure what the best way to resolve this is, other than to delete everything and re-upload it and re-add each track to the appropriate playlist. I've got a ton of playlists, and so doing that would cause me to loose an awful lot of information, so I'm reluctant to do that.
mikelach2,
Thanks for letting us know. This is certainly not the experience that we want you to have with your music library, and we are going to do everything we can to help you. Were you able to remove the duplicate tracks using the link we previously provided you? If not, please give those steps a try, and let us know the outcome. Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities. Cheers!
mikelach2,
Thanks for letting us know. We completely understand your reluctance to deleting everything and starting over with a new library, and we are going to do everything we can to help you. When you have a free moment, can you please tell us if you imported these tracks via CD or if you purchase your tracks via the iTunes Store? Also, are you only showing duplicates for the Clarity album by Jimmy Eat World?
Thanks for using the Apple Support Communities.
Cheers!
Thanks.
In this case, I am only showing these local/streaming duplicates for Jimmy Eat World Clarity. These were songs imported from CD.
As I mentioned, doing an Update iCloud Library over the weekend resolved this issue for songs I played on Friday. I played Jimmy Eat World on Sunday, and the problem came back.
I don't see these duplicates on my other Mac (up-to-date macOS and Apple Music); that one doesn't access my large local library of lossless tunes and only plays via streaming, but the library seems intact there.
Thank you!
Recently Played streaming troubles, 6/5/2021
