Near Duplicate Playlist is Created when Syncing with IPhone

I suddenly began having this issue too.

The way I got around it was to deselect all playlists, sync phone, then reselect the desired playlist and sync again.

So I finally sorted this by:

Uninstalling iTunes

Installing an old version 12.1.3.6

Reconstituting my entire library and playlists

Erasing all data off my iPod and booting it as a new iPod

Syncing with iTunes

The whole process has taken nearly two weeks and I am not amused! I will not be updating iTunes again for a long time. Hope you're reading this Apple - Grrrrr!

I compare the duplicate playlist to the original by creating a smart playlist:

If the duplicate has no songs that are not in the original, I delete the duplicate playlist. I've found that for some original-duplicate pairs, the duplicate has a few additional songs. Usually that's because I got tired of them and deleted them on the original; but I may drag them to the original. For other pairs, the duplicate has no songs that are not in the original. Conclusion; iTunes creates a duplicate during syncing whether or not it will include different songs. (I don't check for an original that has songs that aren't in the duplicate, because I buy my music on my Mac; so that will always be the case.)

I think the underlying issue is that iTunes was originally designed to treat the iPod/iPhone/iPad as a dumb appendage of the Mac. But now the system is evolving into a peer-to-peer relationship, and a playlist can be modified both on the computer and on the phone. So, during syncing, the software may be challenged to merge the Mac and iPhone playlist versions. One might propose various rules; generate a new playlist that has all the songs from the other two playlists; or take the playlist with the most songs as the master, or the one most recently changed, or the one that resides on the Mac. One might offer a choice of playlist syncing rules in Settings or Preferences and let us decide. Apple seems to have declined to face the issue, and instead preserves both playlist versions with no examination of them, saying basically that you're on your own. Which may reflect another underlying issue; Apple has become more interested in renting music than in selling it.

Another interesting wrinkle I've noticed in this business is that, after I delete the duplicate playlist, its entry in the smart playlist's rules turns blank. If I keep the smart playlist and sync again, and a duplicate playlist is again created, the smart playlist's rules don't show the duplicate playlist's name until I navigate to it, despite Live Updating. This suggests that playlists have system-generated internal identifiers. So, each successive duplicate of the same original gets a unique identifier even though its displayed name is the same as that of a previous duplicate. I'm guessing that Apple may simply be comparing playlist internal identifiers during syncing and not their visible names or contents. If the internal IDs match, you get a duplicate and it's your problem, not ours. Welcome to Apple Music!

I've given up with this one, to be honest.

I change and re-sync my Playlists at least once a week.

What I do is:

1. Change the playlists.
2. Sync the iPhone..
3. Wait for the inevitable duplicates to appear.
4. Go back to the playlists on iTunes
5. Delete duplicates..i.e. those with a "1" after them.
6. Re-sync the iPhone and voila everything has been successfully synced! 😉

It's a total pain in the you know where, to be honest..and it's downright shoddy IMO that this issue can't be solved with a simple update, we shouldn't have to go through this total polava ever single time.

I'm pretty sure that the bods at Apple are aware of this issue and it's high time they did something about it! 😠😉

Bah. When I first started experiencing this issue, I couldn't find any threads about it. This must have been shortly before these threads were created because clearly I'm not the only one. I thought I'd just add my voice to the void that Apple will never respond to (but hopefully they'll actually fix it one day right)...

I've tried loads of things to stop this from happening for the last few years, and I had about 6 months maybe where it stopped happening altogether. That was great! However recently those dreaded +1s have started appearing again. At least I know I'm not alone ... Yeah it's not much of a comfort to me either.

I'm really into my music - that's why I use iPhone because to me it's just the fanciest iPod you can buy. However, the fact that I'm so obsessed also means that any procedures that involve re-syncing my music again are rarely something I can afford the time and hassle to do. I have a 70gb music playlist, and a 1.1TB iTunes library. This is on a really powerful computer ... and it still takes between six and EIGHT hours to sync the music completely. (I have the "convert all higher bitrate songs to 128kbps AAC" option enabled, which is probably something to do with this. But iTunes apparently uses a single thread to do the conversion as while it's syncing my very powerful Mac just stays there almost entirely un-utilised. Converting the same amount of songs in an app such as XLD, which uses as many processing threads as you can throw at it (and as much disk I/O), takes under half an hour.)

I like local media for obvious reasons. I also like iPhones. However this means for over a decade now I've had to bear the burden of iTunes for all my iPhone sins. I've watched as the software gained features, became more bloated, FINALLY added "Queue up next" features that made sense (shout out to iTunes DJ/Party Shuffle), and finally recently they took some hardly-even-noticed features out, to the zeroth gain of performance or efficiency. I like the UI now, it's not too bad, but it STUNS me that Apple, literally the world's richest and most admired company, can't make a basic database-driven app work to sync music back and forth. Now, nothing works 100% and is totally bug free. But as we've all seen, iTunes is actually experiencing a regression. If you had, say, a iPod (5th generation) back in 2006, you would have been able to sync your tunes to your heart's desire without this problem.

Apple needs to prioritise this because the people who are hanging on and using iTunes for their local media are likely some of their longest-running, longest-suffering and most dedicated customers. I'm so deeply locked in to the iTunes ecosystem that it will be an epically gargantuan effort to move to another platform, but if I can't get my ridiculously expensive and advanced devices to perform the basic features that I prioritise most, Apple will literally be forcing me to start looking at other solutions.

FIX IT APPLE. (Oh and stop blocking me from purchases I already own because I happen to owe you £5 that you can't think I will get away with not paying you. I'm a poor, ill person. But that's another gripe... More related to how you treat your customers. This thread is about your products NOT WORKING PROPERLY. Is this really so hard to fix? I mean, right now I can bring up my Photos app, type in 'trees' and see all the photos that contain any kind of tree out of my iCloud-hosted photo library which runs at 80gb. BUT YOU CAN'T SYNC MY MUSIC PLAYLISTS WITHOUT CREATING CRUFT THAT I HAVE TO MANUALLY CLEAN OUT EACH TIME? d a m n)

I have a similar problem except it seems as though my iPod Touch Gen 5 is controlling the sync - so the newly created playlist in iTunes is the version that was on the iPod. The updated version in iTunes doesn't sync to the iPod. I reset my iPod completely last week so that it was factory clean and the problem still persists.

Getting very annoyed and frustrated!

Anyone got any new ideas? I have tried all the options suggested below in this thread.

Thanks

Vivien

Thank you. did that but it didn't work for me.

- I DON'T see the duplicate playlists in my iTunes main library

- I DON'T see the duplicate playlists in my phone

- I SEE the duplicate playlists in my iTunes when I click on the phone symbol and show the iPhone parameters

Hi there Vivien.

Well, you are made of stronger stuff than me..

I'm not sure that I'm ready to go through all of that when I can still delete the offending playlists quickly and then resync, even though it's still a pain..

I remember doing something like that for another reason a few years back when I used an iPod myself, before I had an iPhone (I still use my wonderful "old" iPod Classic, even though I get error messages every single time I try to sync it with iTunes these days! 😠😉) and remember the nightmare of sorting it all out.

What, with that and the hassle I've had with Google Calendar not sending notifications and the "workarounds/fixes" being short lived for both, I wonder whether I'd be best off jumping ship; the only thing that keeps me is the general advantage of using iTunes as I know of no alternative if I want to sync my iPhone with my Car Stereo!

Well I didn't really have an alternative as iTunes was not syncing with my iPod at all and my iPod was just creating new playlists without the new material.

I certainly wouldn't want to do it again, but like you I think iTunes is still the best way to get my iPod working in my car.

Cheers.

I agree with you about the lack of support by Apple for iTunes. My music has had a number of issues and Apple support is not helpful. The worst problems are with iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library. Why won't Apple put some of its resources into restoring iTunes for the users?

What!? That post is from 2013 and it's still an issue !!! APPLE FIX THIS !
between iPhone 5s and MacBook Air, latest updates on both, i religiously do updates but they haven't fixed this problem for years!

Wow ! it’s not just me I see, just bought an IPad 5th generation and I can’t believe this company with all its resources can’t come up with a good music library . I’m having duplicate playlist too , problems syncing I have to sync several times for it to work , songs disappearing from my playlist grrr . To make it worse I use my library music for my classes so to me that this is for my job Will Seriously think about ditching apple . So frustrated .

I'm having the same issue and just got off the phone with apple support. This issue is being looked into apparently and they'll want to get diagnostics off of your device.

amen!

djscottie wrote:

Hey Apple, I abandoned everything I knew and loved (including my FAR superior HTC One M9) for the SOLE purpose of making my music syncing easier.

This has been going on for several months now, and, based on your lack of a response, there is no end in site.

Might I suggest un-f*cking this problem relatively soon? I've already given up on the new Macbook. Let's not have my iPhone go the same way, eh?

I'm starting to get tired of overpriced and lackluster mac products, which phone and computer did you end up with?

....Oh I see the htc for the phone.