Strange icon in iTunes - showing duplicate songs

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Strange icon in iTunes - showing duplicate songs

At one point I was using iTunes to automatically synch with my iPhone. I decided to change the setting to manually manage music, etc. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence, but at some point thereafter, I noticed duplicates showing in iTunes...accompanied by a strange icon. The songs with the icon are not duplicated on my iPhone...Just indicating as much in iTunes. If I remove the duplicate from the list, the number of songs decreases. When I disconnect my phone and reconnect it to my PC, iTunes will then show the duplicate again. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

Thanks.

Screen Print:

Posted on Mar 27, 2015 2:48 PM

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Answer 1

jsymonds Author

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Mar 27, 2015 7:12 PM in response to jsymonds

Can anyone help, please?

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

272,887 points

Mar 28, 2015 4:31 AM in response to jsymonds

This is a screenshot of the contents of the device, yes?

When the media on the device won't update as expected during a sync the method that usually works is this:

Export the contents of the camera roll. (You should do this routinely anyway.)
Backup the device, unless you have a recent backup that you would prefer to restore.
Restore as a new device. (The general restore process doesn't seem to clear things out before reloading, so there can be issues with missing artwork or incorrect capacity calculations.)
Restore the chosen backup.

In some cases it might pay to use the recovery mode method given in HT201263: If you can't update or restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch at step 3 to ensure that a device has been completely reset before reloading your content.

tt2

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Answer 3

jsymonds Author

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5 points

Mar 28, 2015 6:35 AM in response to turingtest2

Yes, the screen shot shows the duplicated songs with the "strange" icon. This only started happening after I change the sync settings, cleared all the songs from my iPhone and manually copied to the phone songs from my iTunes Library.

I routinely backup the phone. Thank you for the suggestion. I'd really rather not go through the restore process, but I'll consider it.

Any ideas why the songs are showing with that strange cog icon?

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Answer 4

turingtest2

Level 10

272,887 points

Mar 28, 2015 6:47 AM in response to jsymonds

The dotty icon shows pending transfers to the device. When things are working properly you can see them disappear and the text change from feint to normal as the track are uploaded. When the process stalls nothing gets updated. Of course in the normal course of events you wouldn't see duplicates either. The fact that you do suggests iTunes has got confused about what is and is not already on the device. Each track in iTunes is represented by something called a Library Persistent ID. In principle that view you see should be made up of unique IDs which would only contain duplicates if your library contained duplicates too. I wonder if your library got rebuilt in some fashion.

tt2

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