iTunes Match Bug: Duplicate Songs

and where the heck did my ringtones I downloaded from the appstore go too???

I just downloaded match two days ago, because of this new download ive had to crash my phone three times today and reload per my carrier. I'm calling Apple and telling them I want my money back for match because this is crap, Ive got 9 for some songs 3 for some some tracks missing completely, and when they get their crap together, or I just go back to an android, which ever comes first.......

I'm not following your post %100 KellyLovesFender. But I can confirm that the dupes issue is still a problem in iOS 8.0.2. The sad part is though, I've pretty much given up hope in these things being fixed any time soon or at all and not getting worse. I've worked with Apple support many times for long hours regarding this issue and it's always comes down to reseting my phone again and again which I'm not willing to do because it clearly seems to be plain old broken software in which the engineers have no clue as to the problems or have the time to fix them. And that coupled with the fact that each new update of iTunes and the iOS music app get farther and farther away from things I liked about apple with the looks and functionality makes it seem kind of pointless. For instance they stripped out the ability in the iOS music app to order music by Artist/Album date, combining album/song view under artists, being able to delete music on the iOS device by artist or album and toggling off iTunes Match automatically deletes all the music on your iOS device. All this leads to a bad cycle of constant head scratching and finally just complacency that things are not as good. I sometimes wonder if there are any of the key people over at apple use this stuff like we do?

I can also confirm that the problem still exists. And OS X & iOS updates made no results. I'm very upset that Apple is doing nothing on this issue.😠

Agreed. Spent yesterday trying to get music to sync from library (or iTunes Match) to iPhone 5s resulting in missing albums, duplicate songs, etc. I have all latest operating systems on Mac and iPhone. Finally:

- wiped phone (as was suggested earlier in thread), restore from iCloud back up - fresh start with empty Music app

- on iPhone turn off both "show all music/videos" and iTunes Match in iTunes & App Store preferences

- USB connect iPone to Mac and in iTunes turn off wi-fi sync, turn off automatic sync when connected, do NOT convert songs to 128kbs for iPhone (at times my duplicates had differing bit rates).

- Manual sync small number of songs to test process for results. If satisfactory, sync remainder of desired music to iPhone.

I am in a stable sync situation by doing above. Basically it is an acknowledgement that iTunes Match is broken so I turned it off. I also shut off any background sync activity (wi-fi off) that may contribute to duplication. Turning off 128kbs conversion also simplified process. Downside is the automatic sync conveniences are disabled, the full-size (256kbs) songs take more space on the iPhone. Upside is I now have my day to listen to my music. At the risk of repetition: Apple needs to fix this. Very disappointing not fixed in latest Mac and iOS releases especially when Apple is expanding its Cloud-based products which require a degree of confidence in sync processes I am lacking right now.

Well it does look like Apple is working on some of these things. Looks like in ios 8.1 they added back in the feature to delete music by artist and album. Yay Apple. Good to see your adding back in these features again. Deleting music by album is a little convoluted though as you can't do it within artist view. You have to be in album view to delete albums. It makes it kind of confusing why you can't just swipe the album to delete while in artist view.

Maybe I missed it but I never saw anything about this change listed in the 8.1 update info Apple displays under the more info when and update becomes availabe in the iOS devices. I usually check the info before updating to see if there is anything interesting.

Apple had me reset the settings on my iPhone the other day to fix some issue. This turned off iTunes Match and I had to turn it back on. I got the message all my music on the device would be replaced. However, it did not delete any of my already downloaded iTunes Match music. So I'm assuming toggling iTunes Match off and back on no longer deletes music already on the ios device. I'm hoping that is the case. Again thanks Apple for fixing this and making it work how it used to which is way better. It was such a huge inconvenience having to start from scratch getting music on my device everytime Apple would have my reset my settings to factory default to trouble shoot some issue.

I'm now wondering what other features they fixed that I don't know about. Like maybe transfering music to an iOS device directly from iTunes on the computer while iTunes Match is turned on In iOS. I'll have to check that out.

Also, I have not been having duplicates. I know that doesn't mean it's fixed as the issue reveals itself randomly and the reason why doesn't appear to be known.

To me this seems like a sync-detection issue in iOS8. I have never seen this issue in iOS7 and a second device, that still had iOS7 (migrated to iOS 8) did not show this evidence in iOS7, but in in iOS8 after synchronizing the first time again.

I noticed, that these doubles appear when removing sync'ing via iTunes, removing on the iOS device and re-downloading from the cloud. The problem afterwards is that unfinished downloads appear with dotted grey circles in the "on my device" view of the iDevice. The annoying thing is: you cant delete this entries, at least I cant. Wiping the whole library and re-synchronizing does not remove the duplicates in the iOS view.

However all of the "unfinished grey-dotted" entries appear as 128kbit stream entries, not the actual AAC 256Kbit ones.

This may indicate that these are stubs from iTunes Match - but I never had iTunes Match. 🙂

Calling Apple ended up in an Odyssee of a mixture of being puzzled, ignorant and inability to neither understand, nor solve the issue. At some point, the term "expected behaviour" even came up, where I can not understand this, unless Apple has re-invented the word "synchronization".

The entries are only duplicate on the device only - in synchronization view - not in the iTunes library, nor in my playlists/iOS sound library (at least normally not), unless I purchase something from the cloud, which I simultaneously also download to the iOS device, not just the iTunes Application on the PC. The next sync will greatly double all this. And best of this is, each duplicate has its own purchase date. 🙂

Apple, of course, has no clue so far, or at least it's the regional EMEA support, that is so "creative", trying out the most adventurous ways to keep the customer busy. That's my impression... Browsing the internet, there are many people facing these issues.

In the meantime, one album of mine had a quadruple representation of each of its songs. Amazing, isnt it? 3 times the stream-version entries with 3 different purchase dates, 1 the playable AAC. Honestly spoken, I believe Apple has broken something really bad for the icloud/iTunes Match integration and does not confirm it, because my iPhoto integration also seems to be a bit unstable sometimes.

According to the iTunes Store support, my account is clean, which i dont believe, of course after this triad. And after 3 months of making calls again and again it is really frustrating.

Somehow, after some observation, it seems that the synchronization process does not seem to recognize it's own same songs. The double entries, that cannot be deleted from the "on my device" view (files that are on the iDevice) in iTunes, even have different Genres sometimes.

So,if someone has an idea to "wipe" the itunes library on the device (not speaking about deleting the songs just,restart and resync, because I already did this), to start really fresh, without resetting the whole phone and build up everything from scratch (because Apple does not provide any solutions for this), or why the phone is replicating same entries with new purchase dates, let me know.

The point is, some friends have this issue, some do not, so it is by heaven NOT an expected feature. To me however, the AppleCare support for now is totally useless, so I guess the experts are more around in the forums, like here, not in their company.

If you have other details on this, kindly let me and/or others know.

Cheers

Hype

Just replying to myself, because I have discovered what I already suspected. The iPhone downloads from iStore behave differently from the iTunes synchronization. To me this is a fauxpax, because the iOS download procedure should be exactly the same as the iTunes download via PC/Mac.

The iOS device will keep a storage of purchases locally, although they are already in the iStore bound to your account. So, if you sync from the PC, no entries will be done in iOS, but if you are in sync with your phone, delete it for example on your phone and re-download it via iOS again, an entry will be done in iOS - although this is completely obsolete, causing these double entries. Looking at exactly these files in iOS revealed, that they are marked as "re-download", but with different timestamp.

When these items are deleted, which you can of course not even do with a reset (funny though), the doubles are clean and do not occur unless you repeat this procedure. So this is considered as a bug in the iOS download system, which many sources throughout the internet have already indicated. And now I have found the real matter. Of course, Apple does not know such an issue. To me, this is really annoying, because the normal user would never be able to resolve this and also shows the inability of the AppleCare guys, not to name particular guys from the now.... However, since this breaks a convenience-factor I really appreciate, this makes such an Apple-product completely useless to me.. so time to change, because the Apple engineers apparently have no clue either which. their comments so far on this case suggest... You may use the famous j...b...k, but is this really the way to go? I dont think so...

Cheers

Hype

I don't like to keep all of my music on my iPhone 5, but keep my 160g ipod in my car so all my music is within reach there... except every sync with itunes on the computer duplicates songs on the ipod. Is there any fix in sight for this? I hate having to start all over trying to figure this out again with each new sync, as I sometimes purchase music from my phone and would love to just be able to add those songs to the ipod by syncing... 😠

I was having the same problem, and i managed to fix it on my iPhone through:

1) Settings

2) Music

3) Turn off show all music

This way it only shows the music you have downloaded from your computer, rather than the things downloaded from the computer and things you purchased on your phone.

Ya, but that really is not ideal. The great thing about iTunes match is having access to all your music, not just what you currently have on your iOS device or computer. Doing that really defeats the whole purpose of having iTunes Match.

I agree on this. Also my use case, and this is what Apple makes you think, is to synchronize between iTunes and Phone, buy via iTunes, buy via Phone and have a clean synchronized view on both sides. No duplicates, no dead files (like I had)!!

We may discuss about what 'synchronization' means, but it does for sure not imply having duplicates. It made me waste a bunch of time with re-sync'ing fully (takes time), cleaning dupes and wasting even more time with these "Apple Professionals" from AppleCare, who after a while do neither call back nor reply to mails, because they simply have no idea - and you notice this in the conversations ("Hopefully the customer gives up...")... If s.o. has the great idea to carry iTunes (aka your PC) with you all the time, I have to simply say sorry, but I will not do... To me Apple had the class of "dont care for technical stuff", but it is just too much consulting a support, that wants almost any things off your phone, including logs, dumps, etc., possibly containing important, personal info (not telling you what they will fetch), although this issue is reproducible on almost any friend's device I had seen so far. Many just live with this, or take the burden to re-sync everything (this never made my dead files in the device-view disappear), but here i'd expect a better solution to fix the issue. Which is either a complete re-build of the music-history/library or a clean crossover itunes-buy/phone-buy/sync use-case. The first one can be achieved by deleting the 'Media/Purchases' + 'itunes_control/Music' folder on the device (but the typical end-user can never access this without jailbreaking) and then re-sync, the second one by a proper analysis by the iOS engineers. It's simply a bug, google around, many evidences. Sorry, been a bit a annoyed.. ;-)

Same problem here. My situation:

New phone -- sync'd with MacBook iTunes under original selected songs (1K or so). Didn't get some albums I'd previously bought from Apple, so I downloaded from the cloud.

Few weeks later, I have time, I decide to sync my entire music library. Now I have 2 of every song that I downloaded from the Apple Store. But I can't delete the duplicates, because it keeps wanting to download them back. This is *so* f*cked up. I'm not going to spend many hours deleting and resyncing.

Winton

I, too have this problem and it's beginning to bug me to no end. It's not doing it with all of my songs, but it is with most. And I definitely do NOT want to remove them and then download them again.

So, no more purchases for me until this problem is fixed.

I don't even like the update anyway. Before it was quick and easy to do the same things you have to struggle with now.

THIS POST IS NOT A SOLUTION - Just a venting of frustration.

Well i just spent 3 weeks (yes three weeks) and meticulously cleaned up all 58K sounds, so there no duplicates. Created a BRAND new iTunes library, and imported all my songs back into iTunes. Well it turned out, iTunes only imported things I had not purchased or Matched and downloaded. Yes a BIG F---NG mess again. And so I used Beyond Compare, created a delta of what was not imported the first time around, and this time I logged out of iTunes so BIG BROTHER wasn't monitoring the import and making decisions for me.

All songs appeared to be inside iTunes, Logged into iTunes and things still looked okay, UNTIL I TURNED ON ITUNES MATCH..

And now I have 2 copies of nearly 25K sounds, and for 1100 songs I had marked for offline, when I synced that device, it seems those 1100 songs were copied or transferred to iTunes and now I have 3 copies of those songs. I think I will hold off syncing my iPhone 5 and iPad until there is a true fix for this mess.

Try this, open the Music app > make sure My Music is selected > tap on "Artists" (It's in red and has an arrow pointing down, but may say Albums, Songs, etc) Then make sure "Show iTunes Purchases" is UNchecked. What it's doing is showing songs you can download using iTunes Match and also showing the songs you already have on your device. The ones on your phone have a little iPhone icon on the right of the song, near the song's length. This is so you can download a play a song that you have already purchased but may not be on your device.

Hope that helps!