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iTunes playlist making duplicates of itself

I have a lot of songs on iTunes on my Mac, so I've made a lot of playlists for them. The songs/folder that I play most of the time eventually made a duplicate folder of itself somehow. A week or so later it made another, and later, another. So I have 4 playlists with identical songs in them. 


This is the only folder that has done this.


Because of all my work in building my lists, I’ve been afraid to delete the duplicate folders in case the original gets deleted too, since the songs are identical. That doesn’t make sense to me, but can I delete the 3 dupes without the original folder disappearing too?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13

Posted on Jun 21, 2019 1:04 PM

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Posted on Aug 6, 2019 12:44 AM

I suspect this happens whenever you add songs to your playlist. The next time you sync, duplicate playlists will appear on both your Mac and iPhone. I have been having this problem, so I tried it the music on my iPad Pro. It didn't duplicate the playlists. It only happens on the iPhone. It's been ongoing for a few years, and there are a lot of previous posts about this that are all past their use by date. I can't figure out why it's only doing it for the iPhone and not the iPad. There doesn't appear to be a solution.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 6, 2019 12:44 AM in response to tioli

I suspect this happens whenever you add songs to your playlist. The next time you sync, duplicate playlists will appear on both your Mac and iPhone. I have been having this problem, so I tried it the music on my iPad Pro. It didn't duplicate the playlists. It only happens on the iPhone. It's been ongoing for a few years, and there are a lot of previous posts about this that are all past their use by date. I can't figure out why it's only doing it for the iPhone and not the iPad. There doesn't appear to be a solution.

Jun 22, 2019 10:31 AM in response to tioli

Do you have either of the iTunes Match or Apple Music services? Did this happen when you synced a device? Is your library backed up by Time Machine or something similar. Playlists live in the iTunes Library.itl file. You can close iTunes, make a manual copy of the current file, then open iTunes and delete the duplicate playlists. Should something go wrong you can revert to the backup file.


tt2

Jun 22, 2019 11:26 AM in response to tioli

iTunes isn't always included in Time Machine backups. Go to your Music/iTunes folder and then enter Time Machine to check that it is covered, or review your preferences for Time Machine in settings.


As long as you do all of the deletions in iTunes and then sync it should be fine. Avoid trying to clean up in multiple locations at the same time because that can lead to problems.


tt2

Aug 6, 2019 11:10 AM in response to trentsteelpower

Hahaha, after all my experimenting, I was just going to add this post today, and you beat me to it. Everything you said is correct. It happens on my Mac and iPhone, only when I add a new song. And I've found reports from 2015 about it. There's definitely no solution, because Apple apparently can't get their act together. So I just delete all the extras now on both devices.

iTunes playlist making duplicates of itself

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