Duplicate songs when on SD card

travis_valkyrie

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The easiest I found was to remove all the songs both from PC and phone, then delete a few artists from my Xbox music cloud collection because I don't listen to them anymore. After that I reset my phone, and turned on Xbox music cloud collection and redownload all the songs separately without the phone and PC syncing because they're both only getting the source from the cloud. Now I have the exact same collection on both my phone and PC.

It works flawlessly if you set it up properly.
 

Yipcanjo

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So.......as stated yesterday, I started to get duplicate songs within Xbox Music again. Not all albums, but MANY of them...and I'm not sure if I see any reason or rhyme to it. I have *not* enabled the Cloud Collection on this phone, and I had not played those albums. It just decided to duplicate a bunch of songs -- many of them duped 4 or 5 times. Annoying.

I started over and found some interesting results. Here's what I did:

  • Go Settings > Phone Storage > SD card > Format Card
  • When prompted for "Do you want to use this location for Photos & Music", don't choose anything -- just shut the phone down
  • Removed the SD card and restarted the phone
  • Launch Xbox Music, select Music, and see what Artists/Albums are still listed (my "Cloud Collection" is off and I have no music on my Phone Storage, so it should be empty)
  • Choose an Artist, pivot to Songs, choose the Select icon, flip up the additional settings, choose Select All, and then hit the Delete icon
  • Do this for all Artists that are present (note: it takes an extra 30 seconds to fully recognize the changes)
  • When finished, your Xbox Music > Music Hub should state that "it's lonely here" and no Artists or Albums should be present
  • Meanwhile, connect the microSD card to your computer (I have an SD card adapter...I did *not* connect my phone)
  • The microSD card should be completely empty -- no files or folders present
  • Create a "Music" folder, and then drag/drop all of your music folders/files into it.
  • When complete, reinsert your microSD card into your phone. It should *NOT* prompt you with the "Do you want to use this for Photos & Music" option
  • Give it a minute to scan the card, and then open the Xbox Music > Music Hub
  • Your Artists and Albums should be present

Note: opening the first Artist may take an extra second or two (slight lag), but opening an album is fast -- as are subsequent artists or albums.
Also note: with this method, none of my albums or songs had the "sd card" icon next to them...even though they are on the microSD card. I'm not sure why.
Final note: prior to this method, my Phone Storage > SD card would always show a negative number value for the Other selection. After performing these steps, all numbers appeared to be proper and correct.

I would love to know if this is helpful for anyone else. Right now I've removed my SD card and I'm adding another 20 gigs worth of music. We'll see what my phone does when I reinsert the card. I was mainly impressed at how fast it became to browse Artists and Albums after doing this. Definitely a "work around" at best -- and Microsoft still needs to fix this -- but it may get me past the frustrating couple of months until they resolve it.

Lastly, I don't know (yet) if songs will duplicate again over time. We shall see.

UPDATE: I removed my card, copied nearly 20 gigs of extra music, and re-added it to the phone. It was still seeing my "old catalog" of tracks. I had to remove the card again, delete ALL existing songs/artists/albums from the phone (that took a long time), and then once the Music Hub said "it's lonely here" I added my SD card back in. It sees ALL of the music now, and performance is still very fast. Have nearly 30 gigs of music on my SD card.
 
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helloanurag

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It happened with my Lumia 620 too. I SOLVED this issue by doing the following steps. REMEMBER TO MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR SONGS!

0. Goto XBox Music+Video App. Open Settings> Suggestion> Turn Off.
1. Connect your phone to the PC
2. It will show your device as a media device. Open it and goto Phone memory
3. Open Music Folder.
4. Delete all songs.
5. Now we are going to delete the sync'd data. Goto Control Panel> Folder Option> View Tab> Select "Show Hidden Files,Folder, and drives"
6. Return to the same Music Folder. You will see some folders like Artist, Albums,etc. Open each one of them one-by-one and delete all files in it.(By doing so you will lose all your music from SD card and phone too. So make a backup before)
7. Delete all songs from the SD card wherever you will find.
8. Restart your WP8 phone. Now your old data has been deleted.
9. Start adding music files(not FOLDER) into Music folder of SD/Phone.
10. When you finish doing it you will see your list got fixed.
11. Next time when you have to add music either use Bluetooth or if you have Windows 8 OS in your PC then use Windows Phone App from the Windows Store. If you again try to add music files directly from the explorer then you will end up raising the same issue.

Anurag
Bangalore, INDIA
 

Eating Disorder

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Hey guys, my reply might be a little bit late but I found a super simple solution (at least it worked on my Lumia 620) for this duplicate nightmare.
My songs started to duplicate not on a SD card but on the phone itself. I don't know if there are different reasons why this happens either on the card or phone but anyway, here ia my solution:
I always put my songs on phone in an old-fashioned way which is drag and drop via Windows Explorer. What I realised is, that if you put songs/folders in one of those default folders which are writen-protected the songs won't duplicate. I think the thing is that if you put everything outside of it, the phone makes copys of those files in these default folders, thus making duplicate songs appear on the phone. So, I just put it in the folder "Artist" and no duplicates for me! Hope this works for everyone..
 

OzRob

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Hey guys, my reply might be a little bit late but I found a super simple solution (at least it worked on my Lumia 620) for this duplicate nightmare.
My songs started to duplicate not on a SD card but on the phone itself. I don't know if there are different reasons why this happens either on the card or phone but anyway, here ia my solution:
I always put my songs on phone in an old-fashioned way which is drag and drop via Windows Explorer. What I realised is, that if you put songs/folders in one of those default folders which are writen-protected the songs won't duplicate. I think the thing is that if you put everything outside of it, the phone makes copys of those files in these default folders, thus making duplicate songs appear on the phone. So, I just put it in the folder "Artist" and no duplicates for me! Hope this works for everyone..

Not quite sure what you're saying. I have tried connecting my phone to my PC and dragging and dropping files/folders from my PC to the /music/ folder that is automatically created on my SD card by WP when I format it. All my music is organised into folders by Artist/Album. Now this works initially, but if I subsequently add some extra music to the phone in the same way, I get duplicates appearing. Other things - like updating the Xbox M+V app - also seem to trigger the creation of duplicates.

So are you doing something different to what I am? Have you tried to add additional songs/albums to you music collection since you did the initial copying?
 

Carl Joseph

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I had this problem a while back but since solved!
In phone, turn off the Xbox Music options named Connect with Xbox Music, you may want to turn off Xbox music cloud collection too but that will depend on whether you use the service, I don't!
I am assuming here that the phone has no music stored on it, nor the SD card prior to the next steps.

Format the SD Card in your PC, then in your phone or just do it on the phone, up to you. I did the former.
Plug the phone into your PC via USB, open the Music folder on the SD card.
Drag and drop your music files into the folder....DO NOT add folders, just the .mp3, .wma etc etc
When finished, disconnect the phone!

Not an ideal setup but it works, not had a problem for 4 months now but missing my playlists!
 

OzRob

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Format the SD Card in your PC, then in your phone or just do it on the phone, up to you. I did the former.
Plug the phone into your PC via USB, open the Music folder on the SD card.
Drag and drop your music files into the folder....DO NOT add folders, just the .mp3, .wma etc etc
When finished, disconnect the phone!

Not an ideal setup but it works, not had a problem for 4 months now but missing my playlists!

Question: Have you tried to add any more songs since you did this?

I did exactly as you outlined. Everything was fine until I wanted to add some more music. I connected the phone to the PC and dragged & dropped additional files onto the PC. When I checked the phone, I now had duplicated songs again.
 

OzRob

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Well, yes, I already added some new songs after that and still no duplicates on the phone.
I just put everything here: http://i.imgur.com/tTtVwpu.jpg I did a reset to my phone and other things just to get rid of this duplicating but nothing worked until I tried this.

From the pic it looks like you are putting the files directly into the phone memory, not onto an SD card. Is this correct? If so, perhaps that's why you're not getting duplicates. I am trying to put songs onto the SD card. I have about 16GB of music - it won't fit on the phone.
 

Lumio

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The problem is because of the ID3 tags.

I suggest you to use a music tagging software like Mp3tag, to download the required tags of a song and then try to transfer it.
You won't find the duplicated songs now (atleast for some audios).
 

OzRob

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The problem is because of the ID3 tags.

I suggest you to use a music tagging software like Mp3tag, to download the required tags of a song and then try to transfer it.
You won't find the duplicated songs now (atleast for some audios).

No it's not. I use MP3tag and have spent literally days getting all tags on all songs correct and complete. I did this so that everything appears correctly on my Media Center at home. So tags are not the problem. They are correct on my files.
 

Mitchell Cordova

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I am seeing the same issue. Nokia Lumia 822. After first painfully loading my 10 gigs of music using the Windows Media player sync option, everything looks nice and works as expected. Soon after, all artists and albums disappear on SD Card. Only songs are available. Pretty bummed because i use the music on my phone as much as anything else. Im going to try and create a duplicate area with only all of the music i want on my phone and point to that location in the windows phone app, then select and add all. Hopefully, the artists and albums dont disappear. I do miss the heck out of Zune.
 

Carl Joseph

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Question: Have you tried to add any more songs since you did this?

I did exactly as you outlined. Everything was fine until I wanted to add some more music. I connected the phone to the PC and dragged & dropped additional files onto the PC. When I checked the phone, I now had duplicated songs again.

I have added and removed songs since (quite regularly), without any issues.
Try this:
Plug phone in to pc, go to the phone memory, open the music folder. You should see 4 more folders (may be hidden), make sure to delete everything within them.
Format the SD Card in your PC (you may need an external card reader). pop it back in your phone and accept the format prompt.
Now plug the phone back in to the PC and try the drag/drop method again. Hopefully it'll work this time.

BTW... My SD Card is a Samsung 8GB Class 6 but not sure if it makes a difference (although I had no end of issues with older cards)
 

Carl Joseph

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I am seeing the same issue. Nokia Lumia 822. After first painfully loading my 10 gigs of music using the Windows Media player sync option, everything looks nice and works as expected. Soon after, all artists and albums disappear on SD Card. Only songs are available. Pretty bummed because i use the music on my phone as much as anything else. Im going to try and create a duplicate area with only all of the music i want on my phone and point to that location in the windows phone app, then select and add all. Hopefully, the artists and albums dont disappear. I do miss the heck out of Zune.

Used to happen to me but I noticed it only happened when the phone was either reset or turned off!
See my last post, it may help, although it isn't pretty!
 

OzRob

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I have added and removed songs since (quite regularly), without any issues.
Try this:
Plug phone in to pc, go to the phone memory, open the music folder. You should see 4 more folders (may be hidden), make sure to delete everything within them.
Format the SD Card in your PC (you may need an external card reader). pop it back in your phone and accept the format prompt.
Now plug the phone back in to the PC and try the drag/drop method again. Hopefully it'll work this time.

BTW... My SD Card is a Samsung 8GB Class 6 but not sure if it makes a difference (although I had no end of issues with older cards)

I have tried that exact procedure before (using an external card reader to copy the songs). Shortly after Xbox M+V had an update, which I duly applied. This trashed the database again. I will do the procedure again and see if it sticks this time, though I'm not hopeful.

While I appreciate all the suggestions on this issue, I suspect that WP8's music handling is simply too buggy at the moment to be suitable for my uses. I'm probably not your typical music listener as I'm a muso and add and delete stuff all the time from the music collection, mostly my recordings or those of friends. Music has worked flawlessly for me for years on my Xperia S with the Walkman app. If the music handling on WP8 is so fragile, and I have to jump through hoops and mutter various incantations to make it work, and then have the whole thing trashed by a simple app update, then I'm afraid WP8 is not for me at the moment. A shame - I really love the interface.
 

trouble210

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No it's not. I use MP3tag and have spent literally days getting all tags on all songs correct and complete. I did this so that everything appears correctly on my Media Center at home. So tags are not the problem. They are correct on my files.
If you haven't already, try leaving the last 3 boxes above the album art (Album Artist, Composer, DiscNumber) set to <blank> in MP3tag. I've found that if you have multiple values in any of these fields, you get erratic behavior saving music.
 

OzRob

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If you haven't already, try leaving the last 3 boxes above the album art (Album Artist, Composer, DiscNumber) set to <blank> in MP3tag. I've found that if you have multiple values in any of these fields, you get erratic behavior saving music.

Well, I could go through hundred of albums worth of material and try this, though why a few perfectly legitimate entries in valid tags would cause every song in the database to be duplicated multiple times is beyond me. This identical set of mp3s works in Android, Windows 7, Windows 8 and on a couple of different mp3 players I own. So what's so special about WP8. Like I said, if it's that flaky and fragile, it's not ready for prime time.

Alternatively I could just put my Lumia 720 away for awhile and wait until MS gets its act together.
 

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