http://www.last.fm/user/broken_machine/
- Justananomaly Tools: Mp3tag | MusicBrainz
Use WinAmp or Mp3tag or something and see if there is anything that those particular mp3s have in common, usually you can trend things out easier if they all have one particular thing with them (Had 30-40 tracks in iTunes that all had ~1 somewhere in the metatag for some reason)If none of them have anything in common, I would probably wipe them off the device (Rightclick), sync them 1 more time, then select each one and choose not to sync them anymore.
I spent a few days and traced the issue to the underlying tags on the tracks. Another Zune user went so far as to identify that it was a particular type of encoding in the ID3 tags that would cause this problem. It may be only one of several causes but it is a lot less severe than much of my own research which included rebuilding the collection three times and formatting the Zune twice. What finally fixed the problem was the tags.
In my case, I stripped the tags completely from the albums that were giving me problems and then repopulated them. WillysJeepMan identified in this thread the following:
WillysJeepMan wrote:It has to do with the specific format coding of the tags... NOT the value of the tags that was the problem. In MP3Tag you have the choice to write tags as follows:ID3v1, ID3v2 (either/or/both)If you specify ID3v2, then you have the following sub-options:ID3v2.4 UTF-8ID3v2.3 UTF-16ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1When I specified either of the ID3v2.3 formats, the errors persisted. When I specified ID3v2.4 UTF-8 (and reimported all of my albums) all, and I mean ALL of my importation problems disppeared. Awesome!
Although stripping the tags worked in my case, using WillysJeepMan's fix should also work with much less effort. This solution should only take a few minutes to try. I know for a fact that after spending about a full day trying to fix this and taking the most extreme actions I could think of, it all boiled down to the way the software was reading the tags. This is what I had been experiencing:
All of these problems cleared up by fixing the tags.
To delete the duplicates you will need to close and launch the software several times. Delete the files from the Zune and Sync. As expected, duplicates are left behind. Close the software and relaunch. It will sync and remove another copy. Repeat closing and relaunching the software until all duplicates are gone. It will only flag the track for removal during the initial sync after launch so if you do not close the software and relaunch it, the software believes the device is in sync and won't remove any other duplicates.
Microsoft Support Articles for Zune