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Duplicates in Apple Music: how to fix them

Just upgraded to the paid version of Apple Music (Neil Young!) and have a new duplicates problem.


I have an album that I own and have ripped, Album X. Album X is made by band B, and all the tracks are tagged as being by band B.


I listened to this same album on my phone, and seem to have gotten a copy from Apple's servers. From Apple's servers, the album is tagged as having band B as Album Artist, but having guest musicians in the Artist field.


So... On my Mac, in Apple Music now I see the album, with two copies of each track, one with band B as Artist, and one with band B + guests as Artist.


This makes the album unplayable to me, because if I try to just play it, Music plays each track twice.


But I don't know how to get rid of the duplicates without accidentally removing the copy that I actually own, as opposed to just license. Help!


Thanks

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 3, 2022 7:38 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 7, 2022 1:21 PM

Thank you! Sorry, for whatever reason I didn't get the subscription update, and only spotted this today.


Interestingly, your instructions don't work for me: the problem is that Music does not consider the tracks in my library as being duplicates of tracks in Apple's library. So here's an example: when I search for duplicates per the above procedure, I see no duplicates for the band the Mavericks.


But when I look up the Mavericks to listen to, I see this:



So it looks like the tracks in Apple Music -- or at least three of them! -- are showing up together with the ones in my library.


And it gets even more complicated, because in the Library > Artists screen, I see two entries for the Mavericks:



The second one seems to cover only the items that are in Apple's library, and not mine:



Note that the first three tracks from Apple's library are showing up on the same Album page as all of mine, but the rest of the Apple tracks are shown on a separate Album page.


I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if Apple is just not doing a great job of fusing the old iTunes interface with the brave new world of streaming. The old interface didn't really have to deal with the problem of making it visible to us where the music is: it was always in the library. Now, as I said above, music might be in my library or Apple's and I am not finding the UI helpful in making this visible to me. But maybe I'm just not getting something, since I'm new to the paid Apple Music plan.


Thanks

Similar questions

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 7, 2022 1:21 PM in response to tgok23

Thank you! Sorry, for whatever reason I didn't get the subscription update, and only spotted this today.


Interestingly, your instructions don't work for me: the problem is that Music does not consider the tracks in my library as being duplicates of tracks in Apple's library. So here's an example: when I search for duplicates per the above procedure, I see no duplicates for the band the Mavericks.


But when I look up the Mavericks to listen to, I see this:



So it looks like the tracks in Apple Music -- or at least three of them! -- are showing up together with the ones in my library.


And it gets even more complicated, because in the Library > Artists screen, I see two entries for the Mavericks:



The second one seems to cover only the items that are in Apple's library, and not mine:



Note that the first three tracks from Apple's library are showing up on the same Album page as all of mine, but the rest of the Apple tracks are shown on a separate Album page.


I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if Apple is just not doing a great job of fusing the old iTunes interface with the brave new world of streaming. The old interface didn't really have to deal with the problem of making it visible to us where the music is: it was always in the library. Now, as I said above, music might be in my library or Apple's and I am not finding the UI helpful in making this visible to me. But maybe I'm just not getting something, since I'm new to the paid Apple Music plan.


Thanks

Mar 4, 2022 9:32 AM in response to rpg25

Hey thererpg25,


Thanks for using Apple Support Communities!


Based on what you're experiencing, these steps can help you find the duplicates:

1.In the Music app  on your Mac, click Songs in the sidebar on the left.
2. Select an item, then do one of the following:
Find every instance of that item in your library: Choose File > Library > Show Duplicate Items.
Find exact duplicates: Hold down the Option key, then choose File > Library > Show Exact Duplicate Items.

This information is found in Find duplicate items in Music on Mac. As a suggestion, you might want to find Album X that you ripped from the CD to see what is included and test out removing or adding the B+ information. We'd suggest only doing this with 1 song to see if it reduces the duplicate. If it does, then you can proceed with the rest of the songs.


This would be of help too: Identify cloud status icons in your music library on your Mac or PC. This will help you see how the music is sorted with the Sync Library. We'd suggest comparing both versions of Album X.


We're hoping this helps!

Mar 8, 2022 6:08 AM in response to rpg25

We appreciate you getting back to us about this, rpg25.

For clarification, does this occur with any other artists? Did you see the same behavior before updating to Apple Music? Also, if you use Apple Music on a different device, is the behavior the same?

Thanks for these answers so we can dig into this a bit further.

Duplicates in Apple Music: how to fix them

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