Multiple Sync of the Same Songs

My zune software keeps syncing the same songs. Especially songs without album info and duplicate songs. This is a major problem for me, since I will get 10 of the same songs. Thanks.

I'm having the same issue.  Have you read a reasonable solution here?

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http://www.last.fm/user/broken_machine/

For some reason if you went from 1.4 straight to 2.2 it resyncs any song with a blank album tag.

The fastest way to fill in the blanks:
Settings > Device, clear your Zune of all data
Close the software.
Download winamp, let it scan for all your songs.
Now, sort by "Album" by clicking the album tab at the top, select all the tracks with a blank spot where the album is suppose to be.
Hit Ctrl+E and click the checkbox beside "Album" and type "Uknown Album" and click ok
This fills in the blanks for all the tracks you have with a blank album tag the fasest, of course you can manually do it but either way they wont resync.
Exit winamp
Open the Zune software and let it sync

Should no longer have dups.

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- Justananomaly Tools: Mp3tag | MusicBrainz

Thanks for the response, Justananomoly!

Followed all of your directions and didn't find any tracks with missing album tags...I'm pretty meticulous about maintaining my audio files. 

I had made a list of all of the duplicated tracks though, so I went through Winamp and updated the album info for all of them...just re-entered the album name and made it reset the tags.  Synced everything back into my Zune (2.5 hours later!) and it looked great.  No dupes!

Plugged in the device this morning and it went through and duplicated all of the original "problem" tracks over again.  I've synced twice so now I've got 2 copies of about 30 different songs.  It seems that Putridpete and I are having the same persistent issue.

I don't think I ever had 1.4 on my Zune...it's a brand new 80GB and it's been running 2.2 since I took it out of the box (I think).

What would you advise?

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http://www.last.fm/user/broken_machine/

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.

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- Justananomaly Tools: Mp3tag | MusicBrainz

Last night I did this:
- Delete all tracks from my Zune.
- Delete all tracks from my Collection (by deleting the Zunestore.asd file).
- Dellete all "multiplying" tracks from Explorer.
- Re-rip all of those tracks with WMP11.
- Repopulate the Collection by relaunching the software.
- Sync my Zune to the Collection.

I'm back to only 1 copy of each track on the player...I haven't attempted another sync, though.  I picked up some new CDs this morning that I'll have to add to my player, so I'll report back after it goes through the sync process again.

It shouldn't be this hard to enjoy my Zune!

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http://www.last.fm/user/broken_machine/

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-8
ID3v2.3 UTF-16
ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1

When 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:

 

• Zune software would automatically update tags with incorrect information.  This put the v1 and v2 tags out of sync and caused sorting and display issues.  This was even with auto update toggled off.
• Although tagged correctly, tracks would show up with information for another track.  It could be fixed in the display but would still sync incorrectly.  It would sync the track repeatedly causing duplicates on the device.
• Tracks could not be added to the Collection.  This was because the software read the tags and believed that the song was ALREADY in the Collection.  As a result, it would simply replace the previous file with the new one instead of adding it.

 

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.

 

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