Way to prevent duplicates in playlists.

[LakeWorthB]

I have big playlists, and would like a built in way to prevent duplicates from occuring in my playlists.  This could be an option to prevent, or select/hide duplicates.

[ben888c]

A simple way would be to have a check icon in front of each playlist the song's in when you click on "add to playlist" and see the playlists list...

[rednblu]

I suggest that "preventing duplicates in playlists" is not the most useful problem to solve for the PC software.  I suggest that providing an easy way to "delete unwanted tracks from a Folder" would be much more useful.

"Preventing duplicates in playlists" would be useful only if you assembled your playlists one track at a time-- and even then I doubt that the "prevent duplicates in playlists" would be able to discern what kind of "duplicates" the user wanted to "prevent."

For example, duplicates can result from multiple insertion of the same TrackFromA_CD.  But that is only one minor way that you get "duplicates" in a playlist or folder.

Look at the following playlist [http://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu/playlist/26oA5mjvpID4wklTrQAWmk ].  In that playlist, there are over 700 different unique tracks on many different publishers' CDs that have completely different versions of "Eleanor Rigby".  Some of these "duplicates", the user might want to keep-- maybe 5 different renditions-- but surely not 700!

For all of the above reasons, the PC Spotify software should have an associated means of "deleting duplicates from existing playlists and folders."

I suggest the most cost effective means of "deleting duplicates" would be to provide an EXPORT tracks function.  To be useful, such a function minimally would have to export all of the columns displayed when you Single click on a Folder-- Track, Artist, Time, Album, Added, and User-- plus the UniqueIndex in the form of the following example [http://open.spotify.com/track/0lemjg3BkbhJCU6pIR5CDN ].

Then the user could delete unwanted duplicate tracks from, for example, a spreadsheet.  And the user community could build and share useful tools, such as "Save the Remastered version in preference to other versions when duplicates by [Artist:TrackNameWithAllLabelsSuchAs] are found."

For myself, I would want an automated tool that would save only one "Frank Sinatra" version from the duplicates-- if there was a "Frank Sinatra" version.  A more advanced automated tool would look at a priority list in an associated file-- "Look for the first found track from the following priority of Artists, First-- Frank Sinatra, then look for Beyoncé, then ....

But all of these automated assists would be outside the PC Spotify software.  The PC Spotify software need provide only an adequate EXPORT tracks function.

An automated tool could slice any large playlist of over 60,000 tracks into multiple files of under 9,000 tracks to avoid any 1) costly enhancements that would likely be 2) slow to respond when used-- like "delete tracks from a Folder" or "permit playlists to grow to 100,000 tracks."

[shape5]

What you're describing sounds more like an advanced playlist management tool, which could be an entirely different app.  Having to export, then import into a spreadsheet, and then manually delete duplicates and set rules for each playlist, then re-import the saved file sounds far more complex and time-consuming than adding a simple pop-up notification window.  This is also a major development effort. 

The Eleanor Rigby versions are by different artists so they are not actually duplicate tracks.  This discussion has been referring to duplicates as the same track by the same artist ending up in the same playlist without any notification.

LakeWorthB's image suggests a great solution for this as it would simply notify the user that the same track by the same artist already exists in that playlist and then allow them to decide whether to add it or not. Certainly, there are instances where you may want to add a duplicate, like if it's a different version of the track but may have the same track name, or if you want to add the same version from different releases to compare sound quality. There could also be a preference added which would allow enabling or disabling of duplicate notification. It's a very quick & simple solution that would solve the problem for the large majority of users. Most users do add 1 track at a time to playlists as that's how they are built - as a way to compile tracks from various artists and/or albums, or to create entire album folders via drag & drop, in which case duplicates wouldn't end up in the same playlist.

[rednblu]

        >> This discussion has been referring to duplicates as the same track by the same artist . . . .

Maybe.

I give you a playlist with three different "tracks" [ http://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu/playlist/0uDb2ROnZVFbFrWzFdxvh5 ] of "Baby Boy."  How many of these three would you want to delete as "duplicates"?

In addition, the following two "tracks"

http://open.spotify.com/track/4WY3HyGXsWqjFRCVD6gnTe

http://open.spotify.com/track/29LHe8kG3PraghUZOZYsw4

have completely different UniqueIndexes-- but if you play the music, you will soon see that these two "tracks" are exactly the same music-- even though they are completely different "tracks."  To my ear these two "different tracks" are "duplicates"-- and I would not want both in my playlist, would you?

[shape5]

Well, in the first link the Live version is not a duplicate as it's a different version and therefore not the same track. However, the other 2 (1st & 3rd tracks) are indeed duplicates (as well as the 2 tracks in the additional links) - still duplicates of the same exact track by the same artist(s) though but with different metadata/track info.  This is a less common form of duplicate, however there is no foolproof way for the app to be able to detect this for every scenario b/c the track info is not the same. So it could actually be a different version. There's no way to know for sure without listening. However, you could detect a "potential" duplicate by looking at a match between the artist field and featured artists, or ignore featured artists when determining if it's a duplicate.  This may be the best bet b/c especially in Hip Hop it's standard to have multiple featured artists. Which field they end up in or even if all of them are listed is inconsistent.  So in this case you would have:

- track 1: Baby Boy  artist: Beyonce, Sean Paul

- track 3: Baby Boy  artist: Sean Paul (I removed "[feat. Beyonce]" from this track title to show what i mean)

Then notify the user it may be a potential duplicate when adding the track since there is matching info in the track & artist fields.

What the app can do accurately is detect duplicates that have the same metadata for both the track field and artist field. Ideally, it should also notify the user whether the track being added is a dupe track but on a different release (i.e. album version vs. single vs. compilation), which would then allow the user to compare the one being added with the one that already exists and then make a choice which one to keep.  However, it seems the most common dupes that people are annoyed with are when the exact same track, same artist, from the same album (which would have the same UniqueIndex) are added to the same playlist with no notification.

How do i delete the playlist below that won't even open? i deleted all text & code from my response, reposted, and it still shows up.

http://open.spotify.com/user/rednblu/playlist/0uDb

[cappittaman]

I agree with the comments above. It would be beneficial to be alerted if we are adding the same song to a playlist.

[cappittaman]

I agree with the comments above. It would be beneficial to be alerted if we are adding the same song to a playlist.

[msudawg12]

Can we get this added in Desktop as well?  I like to develop and maintain my playlists on desktop and the duplicate warning only comes up on mobile.

[depend]

I am just speculating but it seems Spotify designs this as a client side feature. That explains how long it takes to implement (or not able to implement) for each platform. Shouldn't it be easier to add this as a per playlist flag on the server side and simply access the flag as a toggle on the client? I can't believe this has become a multi-year project.

[hardrocket]

how do i delete songs from a playlist

[WaffleKing110]

Can't they do this on computers too? I'm tired of having to use a filter to search through songs on my computer before adding them to a playlist.