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User profile for user: Fyodorovich
Fyodorovich Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Thousands of duplicate songs on music app on iPhone but no duplicates on Mac

I have an extensive music library originally created in iTunes by uploading my CD collection and later moved to Apple Music. I mainly play music from my iPhone and at some point I noticed that there were duplicate tracks. In an album there may be anything from 1 or 2 to every track duplicated. Anecdotally, the tracks that I have rated and/or favorited are more likely to be duplicated.


I have removed some duplicates on my iPhone my manually removing individual tracks.


When I recently looked at the same albums in the music app on my MacBook, there were no duplicates on albums that still have duplicates on iPhone. However, some albums that I de-duped on my iPhone now have missing tracks on my Mac!


Btw, I ran the duplicate detection on my Mac and there are no duplicates detected there. But I still have thousands of duplicates on my phone, and now missing tracks on my Mac. It's a complete mess.


Please don't send me a link to the standard duplicate removal FAQ.

iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 18

Posted on Nov 28, 2024 8:43 AM

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1 reply
User profile for user: Fyodorovich
Fyodorovich Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Nov 28, 2024 9:17 AM in response to Fyodorovich

To investigate further and attempt to de-dupe without creating more missing tracks, I have done the following:


  1. On my Mac, used the grouping feature to label every track on there as MASTER
  2. On my Mac, create a smart playlist of every track where grouping does not contain MASTER (this unexpectedly has 28 tracks that are greyed out and can't be played or edited - separate issue)
  3. On my iPhone that same playlist has 3000 tracks. I can use this playlist to individual delete the duplicates, but I can't find a way to bulk delete them, so it is going to be a long process :-(
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Thousands of duplicate songs on music app on iPhone but no duplicates on Mac

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