Fixing duplicate entries

Duplicate entries occasionally happen in Chart Your Music and were up until now nearly impossible to fix easily. Until now...

Chart Your Music uses the music service id to distinguish between entries. For example, the music id for Billie Eilish's LUNCH is 1739659140 in iTunes and Apple Music, and 629DIXMZGHC7ILTENTUIWE in Spotify.

Duplicates occur when you do have entries with different id's, pointing to the same song, track or album. Let's refer to them as explicit duplicates. Explicit duplicates are often the result of a sequence of chart or playlist imports while the music service has changed the id for the song, track or album over time. Most likely that id change is the result of a new distribution of the artistic work or legal rights, or something else.

You can fix external duplicates by updating the song, track, album for the duplicate entries and ensure they are all the same. The entries will then be merged into one single entry giving you the consolidated information on that entry you're looking for.

Just in case you do not know, you update an entry by tapping the Edit icon in Entry Details and then in Edit Entry tap on Update to update the entry.

Duplicate entries also sometimes occur when you do have multiple entries for the same song, track or album that actually do have the same music service id. It is still a bit of a puzzle how these implicit duplicates get created, but most likely also because of an import or as the result of fixing an explicit duplicate as described above.

Updating the entries does not fix the duplicate issue. The core of the problem is that there are duplicate objects in the underlying database of Chart Your Music, having the same music item id.

As of the latest release (2.0.4) you can use Rebuild on a collection to merge these implicit duplicates. We simply take the chart entries from all but the first of the duplicate entries and assign these to the first of the duplicate entries. The other entries become so-called orphan entries (having no chart entries anymore) and are cleaned up as part of the rebuild process.

The update (2.0.4) is available now should help you to fix those rare but annoying duplicates.