Duplicate artist listing on zune hd

[bla8291]

I recently added some Maroon 5 songs on my zune, and everything was fine until 1 or 2 days later - while I was looking for another artist, I noticed that Maroon 5 was listed twice - two albums were under one occurence and the third album was under the other. Over the next few days I've noticed that the distribution between the two occurences has varied. This has been affecting my playlists and my synced zune cards - sometimes it'll say that I don't have a song, and sometimes it'll say that I do. If I delete one of the songs, the zune card would say that I still have the song, and tapping and holding the name of the song shows that I have the option to "add it to my collection", which means that even though I hide the song, it seems to hide another copy of the song somewhere else. Not even the zune software will let me delete the song. Clicking on "never sync with..." doesn't do anything. How can I fix all of this? This doesn't seem to happen with any other artist.

[CrowdAds]

[Machiventa]

Duplicate artists/albums/songs have been an ongoing issue with the Zune since its inception. I recommend removing the Sync Group for that artist, then removing all their content from the device, re-editing the ID3 tags if necessary, then re-syncing it. It sounds like there's a discrepancy with the Album Artist tag to me.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems.

[arcmx]

I think you are able to drag the album/song from one artist to another in the zune program. I had a similar issue with the band 36 Crazyfists being listed as both "36 Crazyfists" and "36 Crazy Fists." I was able to drag them into one common artist pile. Just right click and rename one of them and drag them together.

[bla8291]

This isn't an issue of different spellings - they are both spelled the same. I am in the process of following Machiventa's recommendation, although one quirk I have is that I don't see how I can remove the sync group for one particular artist without disrupting the sync group for all my music, since I have the software set to sync all my music, rather than "items I choose". Otherwise the recommendation makes perfect sense,although I always make sure that any music I add to my zune is properly tagged first.

[Machiventa]

Hmm I forgot that sync groups get thrown together when using smart sync. I guess besides either removing the sync group or deleting all the content I'm not sure what other options there are. You could try using the ZuneHDPatch to enable mass storage and then delete the Maroon 5 folder via Windows Explorer first before deleting all your media.

[Meng Bomin]

I've had a few glitches with song relate to the "Channels" feature, so are these Maroon 5 songs Zune Pass songs?

[bla8291]

No they're not zune pass songs - they were obtained separately. And to machiventa: I've tried the mass storage option (but not using your method), and I've deleted only the songs that I thought were giving it problems (turns out it's all of them), so I'll try removing all the songs and re-adding them.

[-PL-mike]

Had a similar problem I used this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

and it fixed my duplicate artist and album issues.

Hope that helps.

[bla8291]

I looked through the copies of the songs that I had on my computer and realized that the zune changed the capitalizations on one of the albums (Call and Response: The Remix Album) - in this case, the "and" was capitalized in one instance, not capitalized in another instance, and there was a third where it wasn't capitalized, and the colon was missing. I renamed all of them so they could be exactly the way I typed it above, and went into the Maroon 5 folder on the zune (through windows explorer) and deleted all the songs. For some reason the zune still said that the files still exist, so I deleted them from the zune interface as well. Then I opened the zune software, and it said that none of the Maroon 5 songs I have on the computer were on my zune (that's good, because before it still said that some where on there). I resynced them back onto the zune, and now it doesn't show up as two artists anymore. But I still wonder my capitalization makes such a big difference - I understand the colon part, but the capitalization makes no sense to me. Why both the zune and the zune software wouldn't let me delete some of the songs is still beyond me. I just hope it doesn't happen again.

[bla8291]

I realized that the duplicate artist issue is WAY deeper than just simple album misspellings. It happened again, this time with Bloc Party, and nothing was misspelled. It split one of the albums in two and used one of the album halves as another artist listing. As before, I had to remove all the songs from the Zune, and manually removed the ones that refused to be deleted, and (after many attempts), I finally managed to get Zune to recognize that I've deleted all of the songs from the Zune. After syncing them back, they're all under one listing now.

Basically there's just one main problem causing all of this: When I connect the zune to the computer, the zune software randomly decides that some of my songs need updating (on the sync page, it says "updating (place song here)"), and after it does that, it either duplicates and album within an artist, or takes one duplicate and lists the artist again.

From that main problem stems another problem: Some songs refuse to be deleted. When one clicks on "never sync with ________", it just flashes the little zune icon and either does nothing, or if I already deleted it off the zune, it puts it back. Deleting it manually through windows explorer sometimes doesn't help, sometimes does, and the same goes for deleting it through the "device" view in the zune software.

This was something I was hoping would be fixed in the zune software update, but it's either the Zune division hasn't acknowledged the problem, or it has something to do with the device firmware.