[Bug] When adding songs from one playlist to another, 'add new ones' adds duplicate songs

[saucyg]

Plan

Premium

Country

UK/England

Device

Occurs on all devices I've tested on - iPhone 14, Macbook and Windows PC

Operating System

iOS 17.5.1

Latest MacOS

Latest Windows

No betas or previews, just latest public releases

Has been occurring for a while, so also happened on older versions of all of these.

My Question or Issue

Adding all songs from one playlist to another appears to have only recently been added to iOS, but has been on the desktop clients for a while via dragging and dropping I think.

I use this feature to add songs from my 'On Repeat' playlist to a playlist that contains all of the songs that have ever been in my On Repeat, whenever On Repeat is updated. When I do this, the client asks me if I want to add songs from On Repeat that are already in the other playlist, or just 'add new ones'.

I always select 'add new ones', but most of the time I use this there will be one or two songs added to the playlist that are already in it.

Here is a link to the playlist: 

'Turn on the lights again..' is in there 3 times, 'Myth' is in there a few times, and there's more examples I believe. I only ever add songs to the playlist using the 'add new ones' feature, so only this can have caused the duplication of songs.

It's something to do with artists changing releases I'm sure, but maybe could be fixed?

Thanks!

[OscarDC]

Hey @saucyg,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community.

You're right, when you try to add the exact same track to a playlist, the system will recognize it as duplicate and will prevent the song from being added more than once. However, if the artist, label or right holders changed the release, it will have a different URI (Uniform Resource Indicator) and the system will not be able to recognize it as the same track. You can test this by checking the URI of the repeated tracks to see if it changes between them.

So in this case, we'd recommend removing the additional tracks from your playlist manually as they're just a few affected.

Hope this clarifies things a bit. If anything else comes up, the Community will be here for you.