Why does the Windows 8.1 Music App start autodownloading random music to my C: drive?

[jwckauman]

Long time Zune Pass (and now XBOX Music) subscriber here but I still use Windows Media Player for managing my music. I still use Zune to download the subscription based music since WMP will play it no problems (anything I download with the Music app will only play in the Music app). Fine.

Once in a while i will launch the Music app. When i do that, after it signs in and synchronizes, it starts downloading "missing tracks". Huh? Who told it do that? I have noticed that the Music app in Windows 8.1 starts downloading music to my C: drive and I suddenly have duplicate tracks here and there in WMP. So I delete those extra tracks (I can tell because the Music app puts them in a different folder).

Anyone know what is going on? How do I make it stop?

 

[Dos101]

It's probably a setting in the app. For me, when I had "Automatically download songs here after you add or buy them on other devices" enabled, it would download tracks that were matched to my cloud collection (despite the songs already existing in my local collection in Xbox Music), and it would download songs that it thought I was "missing" as for some reason it doesn't correctly read the ID3 tag. Turn that option off, delete the Subscription Cache folder in the Xbox Music folder (where it downloads your duplicates) and you should be good to go. Hopefully.

 

[jwckauman]

I will try that this evening. Thanks so much. That has been a huge pain.