iTunes Match producing duplicates in Music App

I've encountered it. Had the exact same issue.

I'm not exactly incompetent when it comes to Apple products, and I have had nothing but problems with iOS 7 and music. I have issues with iTunes Match - the duplicate issue as well as some songs I download won't play. I can't stream some music and audiobooks to Apple TV. It just cuts out and stops playing. Other audiobooks keep starting over from the beginning. One kept skipping back to the same spot. The music app will just crash.

I finally gave up on iTunes Match. I've had it since it debuted and, despite occasional hiccups, I've really loved it. Now, it's practically unusable. I have the same issues on my iPad and iPhone, so I can only assume it's an issue with iOS 7. Music on my computer in iTunes works swimmingly.

Sorry for the rant, but I've never found myself so frustrated by issues with Apple.

blahbrah said:

So I've been using iTunes Match since it came out and a new recurring problem has come up in iOS7. The music app will randomly duplicate all the songs I downloaded by having a second version with the cloud indicator.

For example, I'll download an album and then a day or two later the album will double in size because there will be a second version of each song with a cloud icon.

The only way I've been able to fix it is turning iTunes Match off, restarting the phone and turning it back on.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

That usually means the process failed while matching the songs and has a partial match in the system already.

One solution I wrote up on my blog is to use a smart playlist: http://benguild.com/2012/10/15/clear-itunes-duplicates-out-of-itunes-match-really/

blahbrah said:

It's odd, I really can't seem to exterminate the issue.

Click to expand...

I've been emailing an Apple tier II tech support agent for the past few weeks over the issue, and we've spoken on the phone twice. He's been really great but he's baffled. He actually had to file a ticket with their engineers to look into my iTunes Match account.

I did realize that my Apple TV will stream music that won't play on my phone just fine. The more I toy with this, try and get things to work, the more convinced I am that iOS 7 and iTunes Match are not playing well together. Overall, I have to conclude that iOS 7 is buggier than any previous software I've used for iPhone. I even took my phone into the Genius Bar where they loaded a new firmware. (I don't know if it was actually "new," as in a newer build, because I had the most recent OS, 7.0.2, or if it was just a fresh install of the same firmware.) Still, the problems persist.

Here's a fun one: While streaming music to Apple TV using airplay, I got a notification to move in Words with Friends. Launch Words, music app crashes, airplay stops. Huh, that's weird, I think. So I start it again, launch Words again, voila. Same issue. Sigh.

I've noticed this issue only appears after I sync my device with iTunes. I disabled auto-sync, and haven't synced manually, and I have yet to experience the duplicates issue again

blahbrah said:

So I've been using iTunes Match since it came out and a new recurring problem has come up in iOS7. The music app will randomly duplicate all the songs I downloaded by having a second version with the cloud indicator.

For example, I'll download an album and then a day or two later the album will double in size because there will be a second version of each song with a cloud icon.

The only way I've been able to fix it is turning iTunes Match off, restarting the phone and turning it back on.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I had this happen after the 7.1 OTA upgrade. I had to manually clean it up by deleting songs and re-downloading them. I have a few doubles that refuse to go.

blahbrah said:

So I've been using iTunes Match since it came out and a new recurring problem has come up in iOS7. The music app will randomly duplicate all the songs I downloaded by having a second version with the cloud indicator.

For example, I'll download an album and then a day or two later the album will double in size because there will be a second version of each song with a cloud icon.

The only way I've been able to fix it is turning iTunes Match off, restarting the phone and turning it back on.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I had this issue too. I've used iTunes Match since day 1, but this bug was so annoying, and I switched over to Amazon Cloud Player instead, even though that has some bugs too, but it has the webplayer function. The other iTunes bug (and Amazon has it too) is that some albums will display the wrong artwork on the phone, but the right one on the computer.

It's been biting me since 7.0 and is still just as bad.

blahbrah said:

So I've been using iTunes Match since it came out and a new recurring problem has come up in iOS7. The music app will randomly duplicate all the songs I downloaded by having a second version with the cloud indicator.

For example, I'll download an album and then a day or two later the album will double in size because there will be a second version of each song with a cloud icon.

The only way I've been able to fix it is turning iTunes Match off, restarting the phone and turning it back on.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Get rid of Match, stop paying a yearly fee & use a better service.

Same problem here. Happens after syncing with my Mac; it seems to occur the most with my favorite artist. Coincidence?

ecdc said:

I've encountered it. Had the exact same issue.

I'm not exactly incompetent when it comes to Apple products, and I have had nothing but problems with iOS 7 and music. I have issues with iTunes Match - the duplicate issue as well as some songs I download won't play. I can't stream some music and audiobooks to Apple TV. It just cuts out and stops playing. Other audiobooks keep starting over from the beginning. One kept skipping back to the same spot. The music app will just crash.

I finally gave up on iTunes Match. I've had it since it debuted and, despite occasional hiccups, I've really loved it. Now, it's practically unusable. I have the same issues on my iPad and iPhone, so I can only assume it's an issue with iOS 7. Music on my computer in iTunes works swimmingly.

Sorry for the rant, but I've never found myself so frustrated by issues with Apple.

Click to expand...

Same frustration here. I complained several times to Apple and finally got a refund since Apple had to agree that iTunes Match "didn't work well for you". I tried to use iTunes Match on my iMac, iPad and iPhone, and I got fed up with missing songs (even some purchased in iTMS), double tracks etc.

I also have a problem with Mail and Stickies (the yellow memory notes) where I get a lot of versions of an email when I start writing it. Same with the stickies when I start writing a new note. It seems that the MacOS and iOS start transferring the text (or mail/note) to the cloud before it's finished, and I end up having a lot of versions. Hmmm, I am getting more and more worried about Apple....

Perhaps you're not aware of Apple's track record when it comes to cloud services...

I got Match when it first came out. I didn't renew because it was so terrible. I signed up for it again in January of this year and not a damn thing has changed since it launched. I won't be renewing this ever again. It's such a mess. Apple is the king of "just get it good enough to kind of work software".

mavis said:

Same problem here. Happens after syncing with my Mac; it seems to occur the most with my favorite artist. Coincidence?

Click to expand...

Rerun iTunes Match's "Update" option. If they're still there, check the smart playlist instructions I posted earlier.

For those saying "try a better option" ... is there anything else out there that syncs star ratings and play counts back to iTunes? I doubt it....

benguild said:

Rerun iTunes Match's "Update" option. If they're still there, check the smart playlist instructions I posted earlier.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm running the Update option now; the Smart Playlist showed zero dupes. In fact, it happened again today - on my way to work this morning I discovered that all of my Alexisonfire tracks needed to be re-downloaded (they all had the iCloud download icon, no locally stored tracks showed) ... For the umpteenth time since I got this iPhone, I downloaded them all, again.

And they've disappeared again, for the second time today. Seriously, WTF?!

mavis said:

And they've disappeared again, for the second time today. Seriously, WTF?!
Image

Click to expand...

It looks like the duplicates are gone but perhaps the iOS device cleared out the cached entries based on the library update fixing the duplicates.

If you download them again now that the duplicates are gone, I feel like they should stay this time....

benguild said:

It looks like the duplicates are gone but perhaps the iOS device cleared out the cached entries based on the library update fixing the duplicates.

If you download them again now that the duplicates are gone, I feel like they should stay this time....

Click to expand...

Perhaps. I disabled iTunes Match, deleted the music I had downloaded (Settings/General/Usage), then rebooted and made sure it was all gone (actually had to do it twice to get it to completely remove everything). I then re-enabled iTunes Match, let it fully update and download album art (overnight), then downloaded all of my music again. So far so good; I even synced with my iMac using the lightning cable and there aren't any duplicates yet. In the process I seem to have feed up about 4GB on my iPhone - I don't know how, exactly - I simply downloaded the same 500 songs from the same playlist, but whatever.

I hope iOS 8 works better.

My wife fought this issue when I first got her to try iTunes Match.

We wiped the music data off her iPhone and turned off match and all was good. Then dupes showed up.

That time it's because she had iTunes on her Mac set to sync her music.. so thats exactly what it did, and it created duplicates.

So we had to do it all over again to clean it up. Then dupes showed up again. This time its because I had done the reset of iTunes match for her account, and iTunes on her Mac actually had duplicates. I had to clean that up...

So we had to delete the music data once again and re-do match on her phone. (and her iPad and Mac so that all were clean, then started over) Now it seems to be working.

So while the experience isn't as intuitive as it could probably be for an Apple experience, really its not a "bug" we saw numerous times but the result of settings we had wrong or the effect of something I did.

I'd bet 99.9% of the time this is the cause of what people are seeing with these duplicates. Match is a great service, but it doesn't protect users against themselves very well. If it did that, it would be much better. To their defense, what we were seeing really was a result of the service working as it was designed... it was just frustrating.

Can't blame anyone but myself though... as easy as it is to pile all the blame on Apple for these things.