Duplicate songs when on SD card

[Psycmeistr]

Oh, if you want playlists, that's another HUGE nightmare. Seriously, I would wait till an update comes out before dealing with that again.

I create playlists in Windows Media player on my laptop, then I sync Windows Media Player with my Nokia 920. The playlists, including all the songs therein, sync just fine.

 

[Andrew_12191a]

I have a Samsung Ativ and I was a happy Windows Phone user till now. A few days ago my phone began to start creating duplicate entries. First in the Music section and later on in the Pictures section. I tried all the things I've read so far, nothing worked. I've found out that it has nothing to do with the SD-card or the Windows Phone Desktop-app files on the pc. My phone still creates duplicates (without a SD-card) when I use the internal phone storage. I think it's a bug in the OS and need to be fixed as soon as possible.

The strangest thing on this is, that not every file has a duplicate.Some of them are just shown up once. I have the problem when I'm using the app on my Windows pc and when I use Windows Explorer, that makes no difference. Now I've copied 5 files to my phone SD-card and everything seems to be good, even with the files who had duplicates. I also had other (longer) filenames from apps like 6Tag or InstaWeather Pro, maybe they are the problem??

I have the latest phone update (GDR2) already for a few months and nothing else has been changed on my phone or settings. I'm not using Xbox-Live or SkyDrive, they're switched off on my phone.

 

[buddler]

I don't know why there is no function to refresh your media library manually. Just like with media player: background indexing and the possibility to build a new library database from scratch.
The I wouldn't bother some duplicate files sometime.

As written before, I have gdr3 on my phone and still duplicate files. I surmise, duplication sometimes happens after restarts...

 

[Vishwacorp]

This recently happened to me too.

Lumia 925 (Thus, no SD card. Internal memory only)
Lumia Amber installed + Updated to GDR3 Preview
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit with the Windows Phone App

I'd been using the Windows Phone App for Windows 7 to sync music/photos for a few months without any flaws. Recently, during one sync, a bunch of errors popped up afterwards on my computer saying "We couldn't sync blah blah blah" for each and every one of the songs. I noticed my phone wouldn't play any song that was on there. So I resynced - and that's when the duplicates showed up. I removed them from the phone - it didn't help. I removed them using windows explorer - it didn't help. In fact, even my photos began to get duplicated. And some photos were even tripled or quadrupled. Eventually, photos and music were shown on the phone even when I had manually deleted everything using Windows Explorer.

TL;DR - The only thing that worked for me was to hard reset the phone and start all over. I'm hoping this doesn't happen again.

 

[Carl Joseph]

I've used this method to fix duplication on my Lumia 820 (Works for me 100% of the time if any issues with syncing music), try it:

1.Install, then open Windows Phone App for Desktop, wait a while for all music to be scanned, then go to the Phone tab
2.Delete all the songs (CTRL + A, then SPACE will Select All)
3.Close the app
4.Unplug the phone from the USB slot
5.In Windows Explorer, go to this location:
6.C:\Users\<YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Phone
7.Delete everything in the folder (I think only one file needs to be deleted but can't remember which one!)
8.Check the phone for any remaining music files (shouldn't be any!).
9.Connect the phone via USB and sync your music with either the Windows Phone App (Windows 8 ONLY) or Windows Phone App for Desktop.

WARNING:
If you use Windows Media Player to sync music, the songs will sync but if the phone is restarted, all the album information disappears and you can only access your music via the SONGS tab in the Music + Video app!

 

[Lokiwp]

Hi,

I had reset my lumia 720 for this issue and then sync the files via windows phone app, I guess this issue is occurring because of using explorer to copy files back and forth.

 

[vrouw_holle]

Hi everyone,

I tried this and have no duplicates anymore (tried several times but still: keep fingers crossed!)

- clear, format SD card, remove everything. Re-format SD while in the phone.
- attach phone to pc, keep SD card in phone
- open Explorer and go to Phone > SD card > Music
- open a music file what was a duplicate one on the phone
- rightclick and go to tab 'references/entries' (or something; i don't have the English version of Windows 7)
- there should be only one 'reference', if there are more you got duplicates on the phone

- what I did was using the exact syntax in my song's filenames as showed in these 'references':
BANDNAME a--TITLE 1.mp3
BANDNAME a--TITLE 2.mp3 etc.
Spaces are allowed but not before and after the '--'

- make sure that bandnames, albumnames and songtitles are always written in the same way; use MP3-tag or something.
- don't play music on the phone while uploading or interacting with the phone

succes!

 

[WPhoney]

If anyone tries this with success, please, come back and post more detailed instructions with screenshots. These findings sound interesting.

 

[Ivan M1]

I just recently bought a new Lumia 1520 (with the most up-to-date software) and I too have duplicates on my SD card. I am trying out some of the suggestions here and I will update if anything works.

 

[Ivan M1]

OK. So the duplicate song issue was resolved by a hard reset, formatting the SD card on the phone, and then transferring songs onto the SD card via the adapter connected to the PC.

However, the new issue is that it recognizes the music stored on there as "other" storage, not as music. I have 8.5 GBs of music but 4.88 GBs are "other." They're all standard MP3's so that's not the problem. I have to admit, SD support on WP8 is abysmal.

 

[Kevin Savage]

I have two sure fire o)) solutions to work around this problem (I doubt it really goes away)
1. Take out SD card
2.Clear off all music
3. re insert SD and turn on
4. Re load music in favorite fashion
5. Create individual playlists for each album (quite easy to do needs to be done before the tracks start breeding again)
6. Use play list rather than album
.
Second and much less savory
1. Take out large SD
2. Replace with small SD card
This phone does not like a 32Gb card.

I'll let you know when this system fails... I am not confident of anything working with the current set up. Also the duplicate photos have stopped duplicating

Nokia Lumia 720 OS 8.0.10328.78 Amber update (seriously considering a second hand Apple 4G)

 

[buddler]

As written before: even after days or even weeks of flawless use, duplicate files can suddenly appear.
It simply doesn't matter how you get the music on your phone, which Xbox music settings you use, how files are named or tagged.
Sometimes a simple restart is enough for getting the chaos back....
I skipped getting music on my phone and use my 6 year old mp3-player.

Sent from my RM-825_eu_euro2_277 using Tapatalk

 

[howard24u]

I have tried virtually all of these methods and none of them consistently work or continue to work properly. When I first got my phone a couple weeks ago (a lumia 520 I purchased as a Christmas gift) and added music through windows explorer onto a brand new sd card, things worked. They worked for about 2 weeks. Then I got greedy and thought I could add some more music. WRONG. Once I added more music, I lost all my album art. Then I tried over again from scratch (reformatting the SD card, hard reset, synching with WMP) and everything worked, however the first time I restarted my phone, all the album and artist listings were blank on the device, despite everything showing up on the songs list. So I tried again... At this point I started getting all of the duplicated files. Back to the drawing board. Now, the files won't transfer at all, the device freezes any time I try and synch files to it.

Here is my solution. I went and got my original Galaxy S android phone, I'm going to do a factory reset on it, load all my music onto that, and use that as my .mp3 player. This is the best solution I've got.

I'm someone who's owned and loved 3 Zunes (and continue to use my Zune HD regularly) and have also owned 4 windows phones (and convinced 4 other people to buy them as well) - This has pretty much put me over the edge. My current contract is up and it's going to be really hard to get another windows phone. I can't imagine that a Galaxy S4 would have these types of problems...

 

[howard24u]

After spending another 3-4 hours. I believe I have a solution that is working. I am using a Lumia 520 running Update 2, and am using a windows 7 pc to synch.

The device is unplugged from the computer to begin.

1. I formatted the sd card in the phone and selected "no" when asked if I wanted to store music and videos.
2. I performed a hard reset of the device back to factory conditions. (This would suck exponentially more if I hadn't purchased the device to use exclusively as a media player)
3. When prompted again to use the SD card to store music and pictures I said yes. Also at this point I made sure that the two check boxes in xbox music settings were unchecked.
(All of my music is in folders by artist and album and was all ripped from CD's using WMP12. I then used mp3tag to delete all of the ID3v1 tags, and made sure everything was tagged with ID3v2.3)
4. Now I plugged in my device and used windows explorer to select the SD card.
5. I then dragged/dropped my entire set of artist folders into the "music" folder. All of them all at once. Right at the beginning I checked on the device to see if any duplicates were showing in the songs list. They were not showing as duplicates and the album art was all transferring as well so I let it keep going. (In all my previous attempts, I could only get album art to transfer with WMP, which meant that the next time I rebooted my phone, the album and artists lists were empty on my device.
6. Once complete, I safely disconnected the phone and have been using it for several hours, including doing several shut down and restart cycles. Everything seems to be working.

Where this method may fail for others now is due to the fact that I am not going to resynch my phone again - until all this instability is completely fixed with xbox music. I loaded everything I wanted on there, and I'm not going to mess with it. Ideally, I wish photos would be stored on the device itself, but I'm not even willing to change this setting, so it's going to stay.

Hopefully this helps someone else - and hopefully it continues to work for me.

 

[Ordeith]

While we have duplicates in the music+videos hub, there is no duplication in the Xbox music or xbox video apps. I think we will just be using these to access our media now.

 

[howard24u]

While we have duplicates in the music+videos hub, there is no duplication in the Xbox music or xbox video apps. I think we will just be using these to access our media now.

That's good feedback. I'd be interested to hear from others if these new, separate apps for music and videos fix the problems with the old music+videos (understandably these are still in beta). I unfortunately couldn't try myself as I do not have an Xbox music pass. Of course at this point, I'd be scared to mess with what seems to be working for now.

 

[stemon4]

The dreaded duplicated songs dilemma!

I've got a Lumia 720 with 64GB San Disk Class 10 with about 50GB of music all with artwork and fully tagged - all v2.3 AFAIK. After 4 months, no duplicated songs. Xbox live is off but I don't think this matters.

This is how I manage my music:
1. Master storage is C drive. This is auto sync'd to Skydrive. C is also sync'd to NAS using FreeFileSync. If you use FFS, be sure not to install "extras".
2. SD card was formatted using SDFormatter in a microSD adapter - not the phone
3. After formatting and while card is still in the adapter, copy music folders from C to microSD. I used FFS, but expect that using explorer will work just as well
4. Put microSD back in phone and wait a few hours for everything to be cataloged.
5. For every subsequent re-sync, remove card from phone and use FFS and adapter to add and delete folders, tracks and artwork. Just select the two root folders and ask FFS to sync the microSD to C.

There are a couple of benefits to this approach; it seems to avoid the duplicated tracks problem - at least for me, copying using adapter is much faster than copy direct to phone plus FFS is a great piece of software for keeping stuff in sync.

I'm fairly sure that this is not an sd card or phone hardware problem. The only time this process failed to work was when I connect the phone directly to the computer and performed some file operations. Duplicates then started to appear. Now, for the last four months, I have not cable connected phone to computer and no duplicates. Coincidence?

Good luck

 

[ncyankee101]

Stemon4,

I was about to post almost the same thing as you, with the addition that I formatted my 64GB Sandisk ultra to FAT32. I just did it today, but have rebooted several times and still sorting by album/artist and no duplicates. I synced using WMP, the only glitches were that the phone did not see any music when I first rebooted - but I hooked up via usb and opened a folder on my laptop, and they all magically appeared. Also, a lot of my album art is not showing up (all songs were ripped from CDs), although oddly enough I am getting artist wallpaper I have never seen before.

I have had so many issues the last few weeks with this phone, it got to the point it would not read anything off the sd card - even photos and videos I had just shot - even though all the files were there and playable via file explorer on my laptop. A hard reset solved all that, except that some duplicates still showed up, I suspect hidden files were restored to my phone after the hard reset (which I did as a restore not a clean reset).

I have yet to add more music but I had planned to do it the way you said, using an adapter and the card reader on my laptop. I have resigned myself to the possibility that I might have to reformat the card and reload my music from time to time if I want to add more, but at least I can drag and drop my entire collection to the sync list at one time and just leave the computer alone for an hour or two.

Edit : It is now 2 1/2 weeks later, I just added a couple dozen more CDs to the card directly using my laptop's card reader and everything is still working fine. When I first put the card back in, it took a few minutes before Xbox music was able to read all the new music. so I had to go in and out of the program a few times before all of the albums showed up.

 

[harshraj]

Its nothing just phone got infected by any bug (as its a little more bug prone). It occurs mostly with pictures (.jpg, .jpeg file) and with music and videos (mp3, mp4 Avi ). You will see its effect in picture albums, music & video app and even on nokia music . And sorry the only option you have is to reset it (that personally I hate too much) want some update from windows for much less bug.

 

[nemesm]

I have to say, transferring music to my Lumia 820 is a real pain in the neck.

I had an 8Gb class 4 card when I got the phone with music already on it from my previous Android device, and when I put it into the new Lumia, it worked just fine. But it had the original droid folder sctructure so I formatted it with the phone and I haven't been able to make it work ever since. I was able to sync music to this card but no matter what I tried, I got duplicate files. Browsing the forums the safest bet seemed to be getting a card reader and skipping the phone doing the sync itself.

Now I bought a bigger card, it's a SanDisk Ultra 32Gb MicroSdhc card and no matter what I do, I can't sync my music. I copy them over but when it's finished, the music+videos app says there's no music added, everything's just empty. Same with the videos. The card is formatted to FAT32 with 32K allocation unit size, I've tried to sync it with the WP desktop app, copy them in Total Commander and drag and drop them with File Explorer. I've tried formatting the card multiple times with the phone itself and on the PC, no improvement.

I seriously don't know what to do, have I just bought 32Gbs of storage and can't use it properly?? The funny thing is, Moliplayer can see the videos AND the music just fine so it's not like the card is totally incompatible, only the music + videos app doesn't see anything and if I download some new music player they don't see any songs copied onto the phone either.

Do you have any ideas? I'd really like to make it work, but this is getting ridiculous.