Neal,
This is interesting as I had been trying to track
down a "duplicates" solution.
I'm not quite with you though. Do you mean that no
single playlist can contain two copies of the same
track or do you mean that across all playlists there
cannot be two copies of the same track? Or do you
basically just mean that the ipod cannot handle what
Itunes defines as duplicates ?
I've been (wanting to) auto sync everything so I
guess I'm a little different. I have quite a lot of
"duplicates" though most of them are not because they
are (for example) live versions and studio versions
of the same song. I think I'll live with restoring
the ipod until a fix comes along rather than deleting
all of them.
I did read somewhere that itunes 7 changed how it
handled duplicates and maybe this is what is causing
the bug.
thanks for your post Neal.
I'm not certain how it works across multiple playlists. But I have one playlist I call "To iPod". I looked at this playlist under the iPod icon in iTunes and found that the number of tracks in that playlist did not match the number in my iTunes to iPod playlist...though, of course, they should have been identical.
That's when I selected "Show Duplicates" in the iTunes "To iPod" playlist and sure enough many tracks had two entries. So, I set about deleting every duplicate track. Though I was careful not to delete tracks with the same name but were different renditions/versions.
Once I'd deleted every duplicate I restored my iPod and everything now works perfectly...though I'll keep a close eye on files I add to my "To iPod" playlist in future to make sure they don't self-duplicate before syncing with the iPod; that is until Apple come up with a true fix for this playlist duplicates bug.
To test my theory create one small Test Playlist in iTunes with say 2 CDs worth of tracks (check that when you have created the "Test" playlist there are no duplicate tracks). Under Manual Sync select only the "Test" playlist and then press restore. Restoring will wipe everything from your iPod and copy the "Test" playlist... but it will function perfectly after that with no other input from yourself. To restore your iPod to the way it was before you ran the test just un-select the "Test" playlist and re-select the Playlists you used to sync from.
In answer to your question; I suspect it is on a Playlist by Playlist basis. It wont matter if you have three Playlists with all three of them having the same tracks. They simply shouldn't have duplicates of those tracks within the individual Playlist. So, you could have Help! by The Beatles in Playlists 1, 2 and 3 but not two copies of Help! within each individual playlist. It appears it is any single corrupt Playlist structure which is at fault.
I had to go through 15,000 tracks in my "To iPod" playlist ... that was painful and very time consuming...but it worked. No duplicates, no -48 error code.
Message was edited by: Neal Jackson