re: Playlist and Channel Duplication Solutions

Cool.. Gotcha....

I'm going to pull my hair out with this duplication of channels and playlists.  I have my library on a desktop running XP and it is shared with a Vista laptop.  I keep getting channels and playlists duplicated in the hundreds even to the point where it is creating old channels I used to subscribe to (Hip Hop hosted by Leadbelly and New Releases hosted by the Zune DJ's). Both computers have the latest version of Zune on them, and I have setup the folder monitoring and download folders as \\Server\name. 

I try deleting every channel and playlist on both computers and they keep coming back!  I'm getting tired of this.

I just started using playlists and channels in zune software because I found out that channels can be listened to on my xbox 360. I have one PC at home and my xbox connects and looks for the files through a wireless router.

This duplication of playlists issue is showing on my 360, but not on my PC. Furthermore, the duplicated lists are the ones working on my 360, while the originals are showing up with no songs. In the zune software on my PC, the playlists are showing up as normal.

After doing a search on my drive, I also found that the playlist files had even more duplicates in a hidden network folder in the root\documents and settings\user\ while my monitored/update folder is on a completely different drive... When I removed these files from the root, they didn't show up anymore on my xbox. After restarting the zune software, they were regenerated and started showing up on my 360 as duplicates again...

Any ideas on this one?

I too am having the problem with spawning playlists. I have two computers sharing files which are on the main desktop(vista64). The other computer sharing these files is XP pro. Both clients are using the same version zune software. I have used the UNC path as directed above on both computers.

What is the default playlist folder location for zune? On the main computer I have \\main01\music\playlists and also \\main01\music\zune\playlists .  Can I get rid of one of these folders? If so which one?  I've got a lot to learn about syncing, sharing, between multiple computers but I only have one device. I also subcribe to Zune pass and think it's awesome. Just wish I could get this mess straightened out between the two computers. Is there a tutorial around which describes the recommended way to do this?

Here's the best solution - throw the zune as far as possible and buy an Ipod instead.  You won't have any of these problems.

I tried throwing my Zune as far as I could but it keep coming back in other folders as duplicates.... but I have a couple of ipods and they're just as bad for proprietary procedures....

I've been having this issue for a while as well. I have two profiles (myself and my wife) on Vista SP2, that both use the same version of Zune. We've moved the music and pictures folders of Documents to our external hard drive, so it's referred to as drive letter\Documents\Music. Since the 4.0 upgrade, here are the problems I'm having:

- All autoplaylists that are put on both Zunes get copied, again and again

- All Channels syched to both Zunes show up as auto playlists (and get copied again and again)

I erased both Zunes, and rebuilt my collection in an attempt to fix this, and all of my auto playlists were converted to static playlists instead, and don't show up as autoplaylists any more.

This really has to be fixed. All of the issues you mention are examples of someone using Zune in the same way that they'd use any other media player or application (I don't refer to the UNC name to open a Word doc on a network share) - don't make us use it completely differently. Please.

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- JoBrad Live

Within my playlist folder, it shows zpl playlists as well as wpl; my system is automatically creating wpl's.  I followed all of the suggestions, deleted the duplicates and the wpls and will recreate from the playlists on my zune.  why does it keep creating all of these duplicate zpls and creating wpls from the zpls?

Shuttabug - Zune automatically creates wpl playlists. I don't really know why, though.

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- JoBrad Live

 NSILMike wrote:

 mrwooley1 wrote:

 Kuya206 wrote:

But you can add or open Zune playlist (.zpl) in Windows Media Player.

Is there any way of getting Windows media player to handle more than 10,000 tunes? Sure would be helpful to not have WMP cut all the playlists that are over this amount since I've tried to have master lists to work from. Zune is still clumsy to work with (better than it was before 4.0 update)

I searched hard and couldn't find any way...so I suspect not.  It could easily be something like that field is limited to 4 digits (tracks 0 thru 9999) which would be pretty easy to fix in software but very hard or impossible to work-around.   But, I am dying to know why you need even bigger playlists! 10,000 tracks at an average 3 minutes each would be 500 hours of content.  Clearly you aren't listening to them from start to finish...

What does it matter why he needs this many playlists?  Obviously he isn't listening to them from beginning to end.  Bottom line is that the software is crap and should have been designed better.  There's a way to fix anything in computer programming.  It's just a question of whether Microsoft sees it as a big enough problem to drop the $$ into researching and writing a solution.  If their player doesn't blow up in your face and cause lawsuits they can't win, they don't care. 

The solution for this is obvious. Allow WMP playlists to be saved as .zpl files and stop the duplication of playlists. I now have over 300 playlists in the wmp folder saved as "playlists...name of file" these are duplicated by a (2) and I still can't figure out witch are linked to zune and which are not... Please fix this nightmare.

BTW... the playlists need to be a minimum of tunes (3,000 to 12,000) to get a truly random playback that doesn't repeat common tunes too often.

I tried everything and was still getting duplicate play lists until I took my collection off WHS.  I'll admit having the data on the individual computer isn't all that bad, since I back up regularly to the WHS, and don't always get the WHS backed up.  Less chance of losing music.

And I still have my photos and videos on the WHS with no problem.

Wish it worked right together though.