After turning on iCloud/iTunes match, my playlist was duplicated 2000 times

I ended up deleting all playlists on my Mac and my windows machine. Updated iTunes match on both and waited. After a couple days the playlists are now gone on my iPhone and iPad.

For those that used Automator and had 25k+ playlists, how did you get it to run without timing out? The workflow will cancel on me after a 2 minute timeout as I have ~50k duplicate playlists. Deleting them manually is not an option (could only delete ~2k after a full day as it's so slow), but I need to get this done somehow.

Any suggestions?

Regarding my above comment, I'm trying out this script: http://dougscripts.com/368

This has occured to me as well.

Before turning on iTunes Match on my iPhone 4S, I already had two playlists that I had synced locally prior to Match becoming available.So when I turned on Match, these songs (about 400)were already there and the rest of my library was available for download (about 800 total). One night last week I created a new playlist from my "local" files (that were already there) plus only a single other song that I downloaded from iCloud library that day.

Nothing happened over the course of the week, even in airplane mode, regular mode, etc. Suddenly last night after I turned on AP mode, the Music app wouldn't open. It kept crashing, then after a soft reset on the iPhone, it finally booted up. I saw I had over 32,000 copies of my new playlist with no content in them. No idea what caused it, but I am going to go with the idea that somebody posted earlier, that since device was in AP mode it "tried" to keep uploading the playlist to iCloud, thus replicating it 32,000 times since it failed over the course of several hours. I don't know why this happened and it is extremely frustrating.

This has rendered iTunes Match completely unusable. Leaving it on on my iPhone makes the Music app die a painful death. So I turned it off there. I tried running both the suggested script to mass delete all the empty playlists AND separately tried running Automator to do the same thing. Automator would always say workflow done while the script seemingly timed out and did nothing. Whether I tried merge/delete, nothing worked. After running the workflow and restarting iTunes, nothing had changed. I was barely able to turn off Match on both my MBP and Macbook. My MBP was easier since originally, it is an empty library, while the MB gave me trouble trying to open/close all those duplicate lists.

Finally, iTunes match is completely turned off, which brings me to beg the question, what's the point now? I can't use iTunes Match, I can't mass delete the ridiculous amount of duplicate playlists, I can barely use iTunes and my Music app if I turn on Match on any device, and no scripts/solutions are working. I paid $25 just like everyone else here and I can't even use the service. If there was a way to simply select or allow iTunes to completely clear out my iCloud library, I'd do it. I would rather wait an hour or two for all my music to be matched/uploaded again and start Match off fresh than not have the option of using it at all.

Any suggestions?

After fighting with Automator (which gives up after a 2 minute timeout) and the script I suggested before (which seemed to timeout, also), I dug around and made a frankenscript of my own. Here's a link to the raw text which you should be able to drop into AppleScript Editor and run as-is: LINK. Since I wanted to know why this was taking so long, I put some very basic perfomance metrics

As someone mentioned before, there's a problem if you have more than around 25k playlists. Both Automator and the script application I linked before use operations via the iTunes API and are EXTREMELY slow when working with this many playlists. Once you get below 15k or so, they speed up considerably. This may be dependent on hardware performance, but it was an exponential speed increase for operations such as deleting a single playlist as you drop the number of total playlists in iTunes. When at around 50k playlists, it took almost 3 seconds per playlist to delete. Once I was below 5k, I could delete 80 playlists per second.

Once the playlists were deleted, however, they didn't always stay gone. I would quit & restart iTunes to see the duplicate playlists start to pour in again after a few minutes. Unfortunately I couldn't find a better way to fix this than just trying over and over until they stayed gone. I originally disabled iTunes Match on my phone, but later found that doesn't seem to be necessary when using my process.

Hopefully this will help someone out. I was wearing out my delete key trying to fix this by hand for a couple days before looking into a real solution. Don't let that happen to you, too. If you only have access to your iTunes Match setup on a Windows machine, you're unfortunately on your own.

I have had this same problem for weeks now. I've been able to delete the playlists by simply turning iTunes match off. They suddenly all go away. But when I turn it back on they come right back. Even if I press update iTunes match before they start to come back they still come back. Apple care had no solution besides pointing me to this thread which I had already found in my own and have since stopped responding to my requests.

Does anyone know of a way to erase what is on iTunes match servers and start over? I have already tried deauthorizng my all devices and allowing the server to sit hoping it would erase the content but it didn't. I want to have to replicas everything. Any thought?

SOLVED!!! .... but slowly....

So AppleCare finally responded with go update iTunes to 10.5.2 which did nothing to fix my issue. I did finally figure out how to fix the issue. It's a long fix but it seems to be working. Doug from http://dougscripts.com/itunes/ has also heard of the issue and has written a script to specifically take care of this issue. It seems to be working but just VERY slowly since I have 76,217 duplicates (counted by another applescript). After about 6 hours it seems to have erased about 400 playlists. The other good news seems to be that once I delete a copy of the playlist it stays gone and does not return later. So at least its getting better. Here is a link to the blog post that he put the apple script.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/2011/12/thousands-of-empty-playlists/

I really think this is related to airplane mode. I've had it happen twice and it seems the longer the flight, the more empty duplicates.

i think your theory is correct. i went on a 7-day cruis and had my ipad two on airplane mode the entire time and now i have a million (literally) empty playlists. i can't really tell if killemptyplaylist script is working (i have an hp windows 7 laptop) but i can't use itunes to get new music... i'm going into withdrawl please tell me if there is another fix for pc's or how i can tell if it's working or not

After a few more rounds with iTunes Support they finally erased my iTunes Match library off the server and that fixed it for good. No more duplicated playlists. I hope they do the same for you all as well. It took me 3 weeks to get them to do it so if they haven't yet just keep asking everytime you send them a reply. Eventually they will do it for you.

I created a playlist on my ipod, then turned on "Match" and lo and behold, I now have hundreds of the same playlist, all empty by the way...I can't delete them from my mac, or ipod or ipad....I called apple support and the rep told me to delete each playlist individually on my computer as that ties directly into icloud. that didn't help...seems as though it won't delete..it just keeps on multypling.

Why doesn't apple see all of these posts and help us?

Any update, new info, or ideas on this? I've got so many duplicates that I can't even get the script to work (Windows).

I had this problem and I contacted apple support they denied being able to do it at first till I told them that another user posted that they could I was immediately contacted by a supervisor gave them some info and after 3 days all playlists are gone! But beware because that wipe all iTunes match memory so you will have to re-upload everything to the cloud