Apple Music has duplicated ALL Music content

I've been looking into this for a while now and had a Eureka moment. First I'll explain what's happened.


Music (MacOS Sonoma) has duplicated my entire library. Prior to joining Apple Music (maybe a year back) I had some 12,000 tracks. Now every single track has both the physical entry, and a cloud entry. More than this, every single one of my playlists has been duplicated. (This seems to be continuing, some playlists are have up to 4 copies!!)


I attempted deleting the duplicate (empty) playlists but this then resulted in my actual playlists getting destroyed when I signed out and back in to Music (following another post that suggested this as a way of fixing the duplicated track problem).


I think I have the playlist issue under control as I reverted a Time Machine backup while offline and exported all the playlists to XML so I should be able to get them back, but the library... well that's all still duplicates.


What I have noticed is that each of the duplicates has a timestamp an hour out from the timestamp for the cloud version. Probably due to some incorrect DST conversion somewhere. And I was wondering if anyone had seen this? I'm thinking that being in the UK, the DST change not being synchronised with the US may have a bearing, but that's just grasping at straws.


Here's an example of what I'm seeing - note the date modified. This file has not been modified, nor has it been removed and the actual file time on the (external) drive is 01/04/2018 20:37, so the Cloud time is incorrect



Perhaps it's going to be a case of creating a new library somehow and adding absolutely everything back into it. I would love to hear suggestions, as anything I'm doing just fills me with the fear it is going to wipe the physical copies or increase the number of duplicates!

Mac mini (M1, 2020)

Posted on May 13, 2024 9:20 AM

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1 reply

May 13, 2024 1:18 PM in response to Jemster

Shouting into the echo chamber here, but you never know when somebody may find the post of use...


items' Cloud status is both 'Removed' and… - Apple Community


This thread's reply from @turingtest2 seems to resolve the duplicate tracks! Finally! (I say 'seems' because it takes quite some time to match the thousands of 'Removed' tracks in my library. If I select too many and add them, nothing happens, so it has to be done in small batches).


TLDR The answer is to go to File -> Library -> Show Duplicate Items

Add a column for 'Cloud Status' and sort on this column

Select all the 'Removed' tracks (a few at a time!??!) and Right-Click -> Add To Library


This restarts the match process for those songs and resolves the duplicate entries.


Now just the Duplicate Playlists to solve. Without destroying the real playlists.


Reading the other thread I reckon this has been due to an external drive becoming unmounted. It happens from time to time, the World is an imperfect place. Music libraries on either a NAS or USB connected drive is a common thing so how come it causes such a trail of destruction instead of maybe prompting that the source has gone offline / is no longer unavailable.



Apple Music has duplicated ALL Music content

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