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

Dexter2, look for a post by FBVrebeti13 in this discussion. His script did the trick for me. It's been a month now and the duplicate playlists have not returned.

cnrehse wrote:

Dexter2, look for a post by FBVrebeti13 in this discussion. His script did the trick for me. It's been a month now and the duplicate playlists have not returned.

That's this post and seems to be a good workaround for Mac users. My KillEmptyPlaylists script should help for those running Windows.

tt2

You sir, are a life saver

I don't know why more are not complaining. Since adding the iCloud my music library has been messed up. I never seem to keep the same songs on it. And recent purchases from my iPod have even disappeared from my iPod. I'm ready to dish the cloud and go back to the previous way.

I've had the same issue since a long haul flight where flight mode was activated. multiple empty playlists duplicated across itunes on a Macbook to iPhone & iPad. Crashed the music player app on both ipad and iphone devices.

Genius bar suggested Automator script: it hung after timeout. Doug Adams' script hung owing to volume of playlists too.

I did however find an app Doug wrote that when run overnight removed 8500 empty duplicated playlists which was great:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tracksift/id435371243?mt=12

began to work: after upoading clean data from my Macbook to itunes match it seemed to be ok. Nothing reappeared.

to 'belt and braces' then turned match off then on again, all the old playlists returned...

haven't dared turn on match again on iPhone & ipad as yet.

interestingly a knock on effect of this is that my iPhone now doesn't want to sync with itunes; it comes back with 'waiting for sync to start' dialog but hangs....

Any ideas/ views welcome & hope the above helps in some way

Another victim here. I originally solved my problem by turning iTunes match off on all my devices, then letting iTunes clear itself out overnight. I then restored all my iOS devices and re-synched the conventional way. Now, about 8 weeks later I tried to turn iTunes match back on and the 30,000 plus duplicate playlists showed back up on my Mac. What a PITA...why oh why did I turn it back on?

Back to the point now where it takes iTunes about an hour to launch because of the number of playlists. I'm going to have to go back through the whole mess again. I can't believe Apple doesn't have a fix for this!

Last night I turned off my iTunes match, resynced my play list, and duplicated about -- except on the playlist I set up for the sync. Now, I have no idea how to remove these nonexistent duplicate.

If you have a Windows PC then my KillEmptyPlaylists script should do it.

If you have a Mac then Doug's recently updated DeleteEmptyPlaylists script should sort you out.

tt2

Same problem here : about 50000 empty playlists, created by my wife when she had no network on her iphone (I guess).

Since, iTunes is sloooow, and our iPhone + iPad can't sync anymore ("Waiting for sync to start" ...)

So I turned off iTunes Match on every device, had to restore all our iDevices, and cleaned my iTunes with the following script :

with timeout of (45 * 60) seconds

tell application "iTunes"

delete (every playlist whose name is "<Playlist Name>")

end tell

end timeout

But if I turn on iTunes Match again on my Mac, all the playlists appear again on iTunes.

So right now, iTunes Match is definitely turned off on all my mac and idevices ...

Sylar... I performed the same process except I had Match turned off on every device except my iMac that houses my library. I ran the script and it went to battle with Match and the script won. The script won't time out until there are no more playlists with the name you insert in the script. This led to Match finally syncing without this playlist. I then turned on Match on my other devices and the playlists never appeared. It's been about 6 weeks now, so I'm pretty certain the problem is gone.

Well, I'm pretty sure I have also tried to suppress the playlists with iTunes Match on only on the mac housing the library. Maybe I will try again !

I ended up turning off iMatch in the cloud. I'm glad I did not sign up for recurring payments for cloud. The iCloud definatelhy does not have a silver lining!

Here are the results:

- iTunes Match is off on all devices, except on my mac@home housing the initial library

- Then I delete all the duplicate playlists with the aforementionned applescript

- All seems OK on the mac (but I haven't tried to turn Match off and then on to check if the playlists are really gone).

Then, back at work, I open iTunes on my iMac, and add it to iTunes Match.

After 2 minutes, the 50000 playlists appear ... again ...

Just for testing the sync ability of Match, I have also created a new (non-empty !) playlist on my mac@home. This new playlist does appear on my mac@work. So if I create a new playlist, sync works fine, but if I deleted the 50000 empty playlists from iTunes, they still appear on another mac ...

I have now deleted the duplicate playlists from my mac@work too, with the same applescript. Everything seems fine, but I am pretty sure that the problem will be still there I turn Match off and then on again, whatever the device (mac or idevice).

Next step: trying to add my iPad to Match.

Problem solved after no answer from Apple which I find incredible after they turned us into automatic clients for music, computers, apps, etc. Whatever...

Anyway, what I did is use AppleScript and created a new one with the script:

with timeout of (45 * 60) seconds

tell application "iTunes"

delete (every playlist whose name is "holiday")

end tell

end timeout

I had to restart 3 times since it only deleted some of the lists until itunes freezed. After that I had to reboot my Iphone and now everything is working smoothly.

Great work Sylar12.