Why is iTunes Creating Duplicate Playlists?
The majority of Mac users rely on iTunes to manage music, other media, and their playlists. However, if you are using iTunes across multiple devices, you may sometimes experience random issues such as seeing duplicate playlists. While this is not a major problem, it might be quite the annoyance if you work with dozens of playlists – having some of them multiply might be confusing.
But why is iTunes creating duplicate playlists? Typically, this happens because an issue occurred while iTunes was syncing information between multiple devices and your cloud account. You will not see any error message or anything of this sort – the only symptom of the problem is the duplicate playlists. To start fixing the issue, you should first remove duplicate playlists. Open iTunes or the Music app, and then head to Library -> Playlists. Manually delete all duplicates.
How to Prevent iTunes from Creating Duplicate Playlists?
This is not the best fix, but it can be a temporary solution until the issue gets fixed. Use your iPhone to go to Settings -> Music and disable the Sync Library option. Now, go to your desktop iTunes app and choose Preferences -> General to turn off the Sync Library option.
While this will prevent duplicate playlists from being created, it will also prevent iTunes from synchronizing new and updated playlists across devices.
