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In my Apple Music Library on my Mac there are some albums that have duplicate tracks - it seems I have tracks both from my local music media and then a duplicate from the Cloud library. How did I get into this mess? How do I recover, and how do I stop it happening again?
Should I just delete everything, create a new empty library and add all my local files back?
Thanks
MacBook Air, macOS 14.7
Urgh, same here!
I feel it's a pretty normal flow to go through:
I find Cloud Sync works ~60% of the time? I have dupes that show fine on my Mac but don't show on my iPhone (presumably because they didn't match? I dunno)
Some kind of "merge tracks" flow where you take the playlist membership and play count from Apple Music (and Spatial/Atmos audio if you want to listen to that sometimes) but make the purchased version the 'main' one would be great, but that doesn't seem to exist.
Similarly, there doesn't seem to be a way to force the matching to try again, or manually match two tracks. I get this is maybe a niche experience, but it does push people away from using Apple Music as having an unreliable library that just breaks every now and then might not be worth the 'Apple' experience, and you'd be better off manually managing it with something else, switching the iPod to Rockbox, etc.
OK, I've worked out what's going on. I have a copy of my music library on my Mac, and another copy on my iPhone which I synced using iTunes/Apple Music some time ago. The problem is that if "sync my library" on both devices, I get two copies of everything.
The solution, I think, is to delete everything from the phone, then use the Option+Start Music to create a new library on my Mac, and delete everything once it's synced. I should end up with nothing (well a couple of albums I bought from Apple Music). Then import all my media on my Mac into Apple Music and sync it. That should then sync the music to my phone (and iPad) too.
Fingers crossed...
Do you have a subscription to either Apple Music or iTunes Match? If you have either of those then it is possible that your local content is no longer matched up with the cloud, and is marked in the cloud status as duplicates/waiting/error or similar. Selecting those items and using Add to Cloud Library (or similar) should work to merge the items together eliminating duplicates.
Content should only be copied to an iPhone from a single library. Sync is generally computer to device only, but purchases can potentially be copied in the other direction. Once your library is looking good it may be a good idea to clean off all music from the device (Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Music > Edit > All Songs > Delete) then set up a fresh sync to add content to the device.
tt2
Signing out of the store then signing in again will typically eliminate cloud duplicates. See Duplicate songs in iTunes/Music - Apple Community for more.
tt2
Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens.
Just signing out and signing back in didn't work, I've still got cloudy duplicates. I'll investigate your other post.
Another thing to try is holding down option+cmd as you launch Music which may rebuild some internal indexes and could hope hide the cloud links to items that are already downloaded.
tt2
I have duplicate music tracks from local music files and cloud library.
