Two + months ago during the iTunes Match updating/syncing process, I suddenly ended up with 2,000 "phantom" duplicate songs in my iTunes library. For whatever reason, 2,000 of my most recently uploaded/ripped/dowloaded songs to my iTunes library were suddenly duplicated ON MY MAC only during this errant syncing process. My desktop Mac is the main hub that stores all of my iTunes music. The phantom duplicates do not appear on any of my devices: iPhone, iPad or Macbook. Only on the main hub that houses all of my songs.
However, NONE of these "phantom" songs were actual songs as they were unplayable. Instead, they are just "phantom" duplicates that mimicked the original files. The original/playable songs/files showed their sources as residing on my Mac hard drive; these phantom songs showed residence only in "icloud". But these "iCloud" phantoms do not play...
To make matters worse, when I tried to delete these phantom songs --- I could not -- all i could do was "hide" them. So after hours and hours I was able to do this -- an annoying process but at least they disappeared...
Well lo and behold, iTunes Match crashed again and now I have 18,000 phantom duplicates! This will take hours and hours to clean up. Excluding these duplicates, I have close to 60,000 songs so I do not want to delete the library and start over. And why do that when more than likely this nasty problem will just occur again. Apple just ain't the same these days -- glitches everywhere...
What is going win with the engineers w/iTunes Match! This shouldn't be happening. The iTunes Match service works great in spreading my huge music library across all of my devices. Bit now this duplication error on my Mac hub -- that stores all original music files -- has created a nasty problem.
Any suggestions for how to delete all of these dupes in an easy fashion? Anybody know what is going on?
