• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Google Music Duplicates Albums

All of my music comes straight out of my iTunes library and into Google's cloud. I keep a very neat and ordered iTunes library which doesn't include any songs with BPMs or any composers or any of that just artist name, album name, genre, track number, disk number if applicable, year, and artwork. Everything else is unchecked in the boxes if you right click on any given song and select "Get Info". I only have like a few basic genres, no death metal and hardcore metal, just metal. So it's safe to say that my iTunes library is pretty consistent but I'm still having problems.

In Google Music, it will list one or more albums for one particular artist's one album. For instance, I have Tool's 10,000 Days album. It lists two albums that are identically named "10,000 Days". One of these albums carries 2 of the songs, "10,000 Days" and "the Pot" while the other lists the other songs from the album. This happens on many more albums and I really don't like it because I can't just go to albums and select an album to play and it play all of those songs from that one album.

Problem #2 in Google Music is that it shares album names. Many if not all artists have at least one "Greatest Hits" album that is named, well..."Greatest Hits". So it's weird because Ice Cube's Greatest Hits is in the same album as Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits. If I am to go into albums and select "Greatest Hits", the one and only album listed, it will play songs from every artist that has an album named Greatest Hits in my library and lists them under Ice Cube as being the sole artist.

Does anyone know how I can fix this problem?
 
I don't get any duplicates in GM on my PC, it's only when it syncs to phone. No fix other than editing all album info to something different, and re-uploading it. Duplicates drives me nuts. I gave up, and can't really figure out why some are duplicated. I mostly use Cubed Player offline anyway. Thinking about trying Amazon's cloud out.
 
Upvote 0
I don't get any duplicates in GM on my PC, it's only when it syncs to phone. No fix other than editing all album info to something different, and re-uploading it. Duplicates drives me nuts. I gave up, and can't really figure out why some are duplicated. I mostly use Cubed Player offline anyway. Thinking about trying Amazon's cloud out.

Yeah, it drives me insane too. Let me know how Amazon is if you give it a try. Does it run like GM?

On mine, it duplicates albums on both my phone and the web. Google really needs some type of editing on the site or some type of downloaded program like iTunes cause I loathe listening to my music now.
 
Upvote 0
You can edit on a PC. Click on the album, then there's a little triangle where you can delete album, edit info, play, etc. If you have 2 albums, you might delete one and see if they both disappear. It doesn't seem to recognize albums on my SD card as identical, so it shows those and the ones online... but what's strange is it doesn't duplicate all of them.

Yeah, it drives me insane too. Let me know how Amazon is if you give it a try. Does it run like GM?

On mine, it duplicates albums on both my phone and the web. Google really needs some type of editing on the site or some type of downloaded program like iTunes cause I loathe listening to my music now.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ndh777
Upvote 0
#1 Is being caused because your tags aren't identical for everything except the title name. For example if you have Blink 182 and blink 182 they will be listed as different artists. (Or because you have some stuff that isn't synced from google music's servers)

#2 To fix this issue you have to add the Album Artist, it's annoying to have to add, but it's a pretty easy fix (then a longggggg reuploud).

Hope that helps.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ndh777
Upvote 0
You can edit on a PC. Click on the album, then there's a little triangle where you can delete album, edit info, play, etc. If you have 2 albums, you might delete one and see if they both disappear. It doesn't seem to recognize albums on my SD card as identical, so it shows those and the ones online... but what's strange is it doesn't duplicate all of them.

You're saying that you can edit them in the web browser or in iTunes with the triangle?

#1 Is being caused because your tags aren't identical for everything except the title name. For example if you have Blink 182 and blink 182 they will be listed as different artists. (Or because you have some stuff that isn't synced from google music's servers)

#2 To fix this issue you have to add the Album Artist, it's annoying to have to add, but it's a pretty easy fix (then a longggggg reuploud).

Hope that helps.

Well actually, they are named exactly the same way with capitals in the same place and everything. I'm looking at them right now in my phone and on the cloud on my PC and they are both named "10,000 Days" & "10,000 Days". I'll try adding them into album artist though. That seems like it may solve my second problem that would put them under the same album. That's weird that it would do that because my iPod Touch wouldn't put all of the "Greatest Hits" albums into one album. But anyway, it seems like that'll fix it. Thank you.
 
Upvote 0
You can edit in GM in a web browser (but that doesn't do anything for your PC or phone songs), I never used itunes. I just tried Amazon, but I decided not to bother. The upload is as slow as Google, 1 song per minute or two... and was a few albums I'd bought from Amazon! I did try "MP3tag" and found several better album art versions, and few songs tagged incorrectly. It's very fast, I went through 2500 songs in about 30 minutes, tagging art to each song.
 
Upvote 0
The duplicates are caused because of indifferent Album Artist and/or the album name, all I do is edit the duplicates to be the same and they all merge together. I do this using the GM web interface so I don't have to re-upload but, you do have to refresh a couple of times to see the changes. All these changes will be sent to your phone minutes later.

I've been using GM for about a month now and finding it brilliant, all my music on my phone, tablet and PC has made me listen to my stuff a lot more than I used to, and there's no messing with syncing or copying files anymore.
I can't buy music yet as I'm in the UK but I've got just over 10,000 tracks uploaded which should do me for now.
 
Upvote 0
I had the issue you're seeing with '10,000 Days': in my case there was a trailing space character which I only identified when going in the browser into 'edit album'. Correcting this, the two albums merged into one.

The thing with the duplicate album names ('Unplugged' in my case) is very annoying.
In fact, I found that setting MP3tag's 'Album Artist' resolves that, thus separating the albums. Even though it is seemingly not an ID3v2 field (at least in my old winamp anyway).
 
Upvote 0
A lot of my dups came from having several PC's uploading the music. I have a large music collection (12,000+ songs) and the upload happened faster by having 2-3 PC's uploading the data. I think that bacause each of the PC's had the same playlists, it duplicated the playlists which duplicated the albums. Major pain...

As for the greatest hits, I had the same issue and the only solution I found online was to rename the albums to <artist> greatest hits. So it bcame "Marvin Gaye's Greatest Hits" for the album name. It was a major pain (again) to do all of the editing, but in the end it saved my "greatest hits" sanity.

I like Google Musis, but it is a very unfinished product. It would be nice if Google would listen to it's users and fix some of these issues. Sadly, I've seen this across many of their products...
 
Upvote 0
My issue mainly resulted from having different album artist names as mentioned above. Previously, I was only entering information for "album" and "artist" in my iTunes library and leaving "album artist" intentionally blank. This resulted in many errors one of which being, Ice Cube's "Greatest Hits" album art somehow became the album art for EVERY other "Greatest Hits" album in my library lol.

I was sure that it had to do with characters and spaces, but I could not find any character differences. The way to be sure that there are no differences is to copy/paste from one entry field to the other to be sure that each are 100% alike in every possible way.

Ever since this post, I have been adding in the space for "album artist" to make sure there's no confusion. For some reason, the devs behind Google Play Music decided to rely on "album artist" so much. Perhaps because of so many "featuring" tracks. It was a long and tedious process, but it all worked out in the end. While my album arts are still kind of messed up, the artist names and albums are correctly displaying as they should be in the order they were on their original albums.
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones