iTunes 12.2 keeps duplicating playlists. How do I make it stop?

Can anyone at Apple fix this issue, please? While you are at, I also hate how you've killed Genius on the iPhone, not everyone wants to listen to your Apple Music gizmo and eat up data, some of us are barely able to afford an iPhone.

I think I might have a solution, which seems to be working for me over the last few days, but not an ideal solution, are you reading this Apple? You read the last one, where I bagged you, and you deleted it. For instance, the playlist Soul was auto-creating into Soul 1, 2 etc. So what I did was rename the playlist, say New Soul, and deleted Soul. It would appear at this early stage that the auto-creating has stopped. Not an ideal situation, as this "bug" should be fixed by Apple, but a work around nonetheless.

In iTunes 12.5.4 I have found a potential solution to this problem...

Do not remove songs from your device... use only the computer that iTunes is loaded on.

I experienced this problem this morning (1/13/2017) and found it only duplicated playlists when I edited the list on my device (in my case an iPhone 6s).

I deleted a song I hated from my phone.

I have my phone set to update when on WiFi, so it pushed the change to iTunes... and duplicated the playlist...

I then found the "updated and duplicated" playlist in iTunes...

The playlist 'iPhone songs1' contained the song I deleted but the 'iPhone songs' playlist did not.

I then went into the settings for updating and removed the checkmark from the 'iPhone songs1' list and went back to iTunes and deleted that playlist.

This now makes me wonder...

If any changes are made on the device, the device then updates those changes to the playlist and then renames the old one to xxxxx1, xxxxx2, etc.

I know this won't stop the duplication... but I hope it helps someone figure out which is which or help in some way.

It seems that iTunes tries to keep your existing playlist on your device as a copy instead of deleting it. So just Go to Settings, General, Storage & iCloud Usage, Storage Manage, Music, Edit then delete all songs and then sync with iTunes.

Cheers

I appreciate your concern, but why would this be any different than doing a complete reset and deleting all content and settings from my iPhone, which I have done before, only to find the problem still reoccurs?

Im assuming this is not a iOS or iTunes bug. Perhaps this is a new iTunes policy that device owner wouldnt loose the playlist on the device so whatever playlists are on the device are going to be renamed to "playlist 1" and if the playlist 1 exists because of previous synced music then its going to be "playlist 2"

In case of factory reset, if you set the iPhone as a new iPhone then it must work otherwise it backups from previous content which may cause these unwanted playlists

My guess is that Apple thinks this is a feature, not a bug, so that when you change a playlist it retains the earlier version as a "backup." I agree it's a pain in the *** and needs to be FIXED, or somehow made optional for those who appreciate it! Is anyone at Apple listening?

Assuming i have the same issue i fixed it easily on the iPhone NOT iTunes.

Go to your playlists on your phone and hold down on the duplicates until you get a pop up of options, hit "Delete" then remove but don't delete downloads, once you removed all the extra repeated playlists go to iTunes and sync and the playlists should go away on iTunes.

I'm on a Mac myself and had this issue for over a year until i read this and saw there was no fixes and then figured this out, hope this helps some people.

This is not the case here. In my case, all songs in both iterations of the playlists are locally stored. These are songs that I have in my local iTunes database, ripped from my own CDs.

I do not use Apple Music, nor do I sync music through iCloud. I sync my phone locally over USB.

Yes me too. Irritating.😠 and careless too on the part of the programmers.

Apple are you monitoring this?

Its stuff like this that puts your customers off and gets us thinking that you're more concerned with sales and R&D into driverless cars than the every day Apple systems that are supposed to work for us and be improved upon each upgrade.

HELLO APPLE?!

Yeah basically what's happening is any time I update a playlist like the one I have called "NEW MUSIC" that I am constantly adding new songs to Apple makes a copy of the old playlist JUST IN CASE I didn't want to erase the old one with less songs on it... which makes zero sense. I know they have their "smart playlists" but the whole idea behind itunes was to make custom playlists or so I thought... it's not a major issues it's just annoying to have to keep deleting the extra playlists... or being angry when the new songs I added aren't coming up and I realize "oh that's because I'm in NEW MUSIC 1 - my old new music playlist Apple decided they should save for me"

Here it is, almost 2018, several versions of itunes & iphones later & still have this issue. Any solutions, other than having to sync the phone, delete the playlist & sync the phone again? Annoying for years now!

Same thing happened to me. But I ended up with over 5,000 duplicate playlists!!! I finally finished deleting them earlier - one by one - as I cant find a way to select a few at a time. I have googled how to do it, but have only found ways for Mac, not Windows. After deleting them all I then put my Ipad in thinking my cleaned up itunes library would wipe the duplicates off my ipad, but I was wrong, all the duplicates have gone back to my library on my laptop again!! I too don't have icloud turned on, or the match thing. this is a real pain in the *** 😮😠

Guys, Apple does NOT monitor these forums.
The only way we could have a solution for this issue is to inform them of the problems we have via the Feedback form

Feedback - iTunes - Apple

I have the same issue, although not as many duplicates.

And, not sure what this means, but some playlists display the column headers (track name, artist, album name, etc.) while others don't. Why is that?

Apple's usual quality control seems to have gone astray.