Now that it's possible to add our own, personal music collections to Xbox Music using OneDrive, we run into the potential problem of duplicate tracks. If you upload a song or album you already have in your Xbox Music library, it's unlikely you want it to show up twice. Fortunately, there's a really easy way to get rid of the duplicates.
- Sign in to your Xbox Music account on the web at music.xbox.com
- Click on your name in the top right hand corner
- Open "Settings"
- You'll now see a toggle that when activated will remove any tracks you added with your Xbox Music Pass that you've subsequently uploaded yourself through OneDrive.
- In the Xbox Music app for Windows 8.1 the same applies. just open settings and look under "preferences."
- A word of warning for anyone who uses Xbox Music on Android or iOS, however, that you're told not to activate this. Something to bear in mind.
You can still manually go through your account removing tracks, albums and playlists. But, if you want to remove anything you uploaded you'll need to do that still through OneDrive.
Reader comments
Easily get rid of duplicate tracks in your Xbox Music library
If Windows 10 doesn't keep WMP, I'm pretty sure I won't update from Winodws 8.1 becasue that's a pretty disgusting user experience.
I now buy my music through iTunes, with the iTunes Library in my Music Folder. Anything I buy from any other device is downloaded automatically and gets added to my Windows Media Player Library.
The Music App duplicates OneDrive and XBox Music purchases whether this setting is on or off. Even Albums stay Duplicated.
I tried that setting, and I still had double song listings in a ton of albums (dozens) and there were even some songs that I BOUGHT from XBox Music that it's now telling me I need XBox Music Pass to play... Lol, WTF?! I had to go through Album by Album, manually, to reconcile the duplicates, opting to delete the OneDrive version so that I only had the iTunes Purchased Music on OneDrive (I could just download the Xbox purchases again, well most of them anyways so I didn't need a backup). It failed to properly delete the OneDrive files, like it said it would...
So I moved everything back into iTunes and Subscribed to iTunes Match instead (I was only holding off because Microsoft said this was coming soon a few months back). This service functions like alpha software at this point. What they need to do is allow the Music App to scan your Music Library for matches and let you play those after it matches them, and then upload the non-matches ITSELF to OneDrive so that you don't end up with ONEDRIVE TRACKS/ALBUMS ON TOP OF XBOX MUSIC TRACKS/ALBUMS - forcing you to manually do what their software fails so horribly at doing...
Oh wait... That's what everyone else does... But not Microsoft... They have to be different.
I had the same problem, no matter what I did it wouldn't sync all of my music only some and half of those would only do 30 second trial or the no Music Pass error. To fix it I signed into https://music.xbox.com/collection and clicked on "OneDrive & purchased" selected "All music" then switched it back to "Onedrive & purchased". At that point the website started resyncing with Onedrive and my Windows Phone, Xbox One and Surface 2 all started syncing all of my songs correctly with OneDrive. Now it works great!
That doesn't work. It seems some songs that I bought from XBox Music, and even some whole Albums, aren't in their catalog anymore, so there's no way to redownload the music that I bought back when I had a Windows Phone 7 device in 2011/12. The music is literally inaccessible.
Which is Why I switched to iTunes, with a little bit of Amazon on the side. They are far more reliable and they sync music a lot easier with a lot less work and voodoo involved.
Looking forward to Windows 10, kinda, but this issue with the Music App has existed literally since Launch Day of Windows 8.0 (when I bought it) and they haven't addressed it at all. They really should have given WMP a UI revamp and moved to that instead. I absolutely cannot stand their Metro/Modern Media Clients. They are horrible.
If WMP isn't in Win 10 when it launches, I will get a Macbook Air on that day and never look back. Already have an iMac and iPhone, so the only thing even keeping me on their platform at this point ... is HOPE. And that, I am running short on.
@n8ter#AC Unfortunately that's the case for some of the music I had purchased from Xbox Music as well. After I had lost a song just days after the initial download, I decided that Xbox Music is simply too unreliable. Am back to Amazon even though I had loved the simplicity of purchasing and downloading songs on the go right there on my Windows Phone...
i hope Xbox is finally becoming a decent program
MusicBee isn't perfect either through its handy for meta tag editing. iTunes regularly screws up Match, removing songs you add from CD's.
This was a nice tool. I still had to do the removal of collection stuff to really clean it up... then just went back and redownloaded a few of the things i had in there... mostly was all my tunes in Xbox Music.
The only problem I have now is that if an album doesn't exist in Xbox Music, or can't be matched because the name is slightly different, the album art doesn't show up, even if its in the ID3 tag or Folder.jpg on my OneDrive.
If only getting reimbursed for duplicate billing was this easy! They'll never get another dime out of me... (for the music service, anyways).
Wish there's a update to easily make music offline or streaming using the xbox music apps instead of going to Onedrive.
It does.You have select cloud collection in the settings of the app. Then make sure you have All Music selected. It will start showing up.
Ok, can anyone answer this question: Since I used Xbox Music to listen to my library across devices before this OneDrive integration, my entire music library shows up on all devices. Unfortunately, when I enable cloud streaming on my 1520 to listen to the music I added to OneDrive, my entire music collection is visible on my phone. I don't have a Xbox Pass so, I can't play the songs. MS needs a way to filter that out.
awesome tips anyway there's one more option available in Windows Xbox music apps like the Reset button that are somewhat confusing. Any one tried to use the the resest button?
Yup.... you need to put them in the new "Music" folder....
Do I need to upload music to a particular folder in OneDrive?
Months ago, I moved my music to a folder call "My Music," which I created. But I see a folder in OneDrive called "Music."
And. . . I'm not seeing my Beatles tracks in Xbox (streaming).
Anyone?
Yes, there is a new "Music" folder in your OneDrive - you need to put them in there...
. <can't delete post err>
ya it doesnt work too good. we need a conflict resolution ui to easily see all POTENTIAL dupes based on fuzzy matching and let us decide.
This same setting also appears on the Windows 8.1 app, so you can also remove duplicates there as well.
It doesn't appear on the phone app, however, so not sure how you'd handle it there.
As a side note: When are they going to update the Windows app to look and behave like the web player? The web player is so much nicer, I want the app for Windows 8.1 to look the same and have the same options.
I enabled this last night and still have duplicate songs and albums listed :cry:
I don't think its fast atm. I uploaded hundreds of songs before going to bed last night and like 40 minutes later it still didn't work. I woke up this morning and all my content was there. Give it some time, maybe?
Stuff you upload to OneDrive gets updated in the App in near real time. I uploaded some Tracks from iTunes to OneDrive last night from my iMac with the Windows Notebook running the Music App. As they finished uploading in Safari, they were getting pretty much instantly added on the Winodws Notebook.
Earlier today I uploaded over 1.3GB of music to it and it appeared practically in real time as the uploads were finished in the Music App on my PC.
How fast it syncs up is not really an issue. The fact is the duplicates are a huge issue unless you remove all music you purchased on XBox Music (formerly Zune) from your Library.
Ideallly, any music you have bought from XBox Music, you want to keep that track and discard the OneDrive track, since you can always re-download it from Xbox Music. The Windows 8.1 App allows you to delete it from your Library and Remove the file from OneDrive, except it actually doesn't remove the file from OneDrive. The file stays there, just eating up space.
And that's a serious issue if you use the OneDrive Music Folder as your Local (Offline) Music Folder on Windows and have a smaller SSD Hard Drive in your Notebook. There can be many redundant files and they're all just filling up needed space on a relatively small storage volume.
The bigger your library is, the more music you have bought from XBox Music, the worse the issue gets. For people who have bought nothing from XBox Music, or very little... They are likely to not even notice this is an issue, as there won't be many (or any) duplicates to begin with.
The same can be done from the Win/RT 8.1 app... Settings>Preferences....go to the bottom...here it is called "Reset".
That option isn't for removing duplicate entries, it's for purging your entire Music Pass Collection, to my understanding. The Windows 8.1 app also has a setting for removing duplicates, I recommend people use that option.
This is huge! That's the main reason I didn't upload all my songs to Onedrive yet, was worried I'd have a million duplicates. With this option available, I'll definitely be taking advantage of this.
Also, the music locker was one of the only remaining glaring omissions compared with Google Play music. Now I can completely forget about Google and have all my music nice and conveniently in my Onedrive.
Same here. Currently downloading my Google library (since I also have a fair bit of free/bought music from them) and getting it moved across.
Question: I'm looking for a good way to organize all of the music on my local drives before I upload it to my OneDrive. Something that will not only get rid of duplicates, but will also restructure directories, for example by artist and album, etc. Any thoughts? I'm willing to pay if the software does the job...
MediaMonkey works for me, I've used an older version of Gold for a while now, purchased back in the Vista days!
I been using MediaMonkey and its awesom been using it for years and just recent to fix my freind collection. I have all the right high red album art, correctly tag complication albums. WHen I add Xbox music and add organize music everything showed perfect :)
Music bee is awesome. I love the app. I'm currently uploading my entire library to OneDrive even though I have the unlimited music plan because they don't have all the music I like. Now I can have the best of both worlds. Hehe. And music bee is just a great app. You'll see if you give it a try. Fantastic power.
Thanks for the quick replies... I'm going to give these a try!
MediaMonkey and MusicBee are both great apps to manage large music collections. I prefer the UI of MusicBee, but it has one dealbreaker for me... MediaMonkey lets you re-assign the location of its cache files (off your SSD, for example) and MusicBee does not. Everything ends up in c:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\MusicBee\InternalCache\ and it can get quite large.
MusicBee is far better then MM and other alternatives.
You can now get stuff for free online you don't have to pay for it. Free stuff is good this day.
When I did my music cleanup project a few years ago I tried a bunch and MP3Tag ended up being the best solution for me. It does a good job of just letting you make effecient (multi-select) manual edits of tags, albumn art, etc. and then rebuild file names a directories based on the tag data (or vice versa). I tried using some of the "automated" programs that attempt to recongnize your music and fix it for you, but most of them did more harm than good. Anyway, MP3Tag works well: http://www.mp3tag.de
Yep MP3Tag is awesome.
THIS. MP3 tag made my music collection respectable.
seconded!
Just wanted to put a vote in for tag and rename. Not free but has been my mp3 tag editor of choice for years.
Thank you Microsoft!! Now I just need to be able to search songs in playlists. Baby steps.
Anybody know how to stop xbox music from reearranging the albums? This is what i hated most about xbox music, if i put an album i owned onto the xbox music, it will add to my collections no problem. 10-15 minutes later, they will start shifting meaning a song or two will then go onto another album on collections, exact same with with just the two songs and there is no way to combine them again. The only time this doesnt happen is if i only add albums to my collections from xbox music.
if i add manually from my own collect, it starts reeranging it so i had many duplicate albums but with one or two songs in the 2nd album that was made which is exactly the same with the original album. Anybody know a way to fix it or stop xbox music tryign to match my music?
annoying!
I had the same problem. I think I used the Files app on my phone and organized all the songs int one album (folder). I forget more specifics, but it was an ordeal tho.
What about the xbox music app for phones?
..
I long stopped using this app when it duplicated my tracks and added those that I have deleted. Contacted @lumiahelp and they asked me to restart my phone (like that's not the 1st i would do)
How can I do it on my windows phone
Checked this out... The menu has an option that shows up called "remove from phone" once tracks are selected.
Saw this setting last night.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could do all of this stuff with your own music collection without an Xbox music pass
My thoughts exactly!
Why can't I access my Xbox Music info on music.xbox.com from my mobile IE? I mean I can't even go to settings page.
You don't need a pass to include your personal collection on OneDrive
Right. This is only for people who subscribe. If you're not a subscriber you won't have this problem.
You can also buy single tracks/albums on xbox music which leads to the same problem.
But you'd be buying music you already owned?!
If you aren't a subscriber, you would not have this problem in the first place.....