Question Music tracks on Android phone

[Mickmac]

I have an Android phone, a Samsung A-12
I have folders of music tracks on my laptop which are thoroughly edited, absolutely no copies.
When I delete all the music tracks off my phone and add a new folder from my laptop I notice a lot of the tracks have copies, listed twice.
How is this happening ?
Thanks in advance.......

 

[Laura Knotek]

What music player app are you using? What format are the music files?

 

[Mickmac]

It's called 'Music Player' App, one I found on Google Play store, been using it for ages without any problems, just noticed the duplicates last time I uploaded music from my laptop.
They are allMP3 files.....

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Are you seeing these duplicates in the same directory, or are you seeing the same directory twice in two different locations?

 

[smvim]

That's a good, and possibly relevant, question. Are you sure those duplicated mp3 files don't exist in different folders?
Keep in mind the Music Player app is simply displaying whichever audio files it detects. so if you do have two of the same files in two different folders, your Music Player app is displaying those two files as is. Since you have a Samsung phone, that has a basic file manager app, My Files. Use the My Files app to check your file and folder arrangement. A file manager app has, by design, a different purpose. It's intended to display files and folders in real time, as is. Your Music Player is just showing you multimedia files.
So confirm your folder set up isn't the problem. Either move all your mp3s into a single, common folder, or weed out the duplicates in different folders individually. And yeah, if you have a lot of them, this could be a daunting project.

If however, you determine there are duplicates in the same folder, that isn't a possibility. Two files with the exact same name cannot exist in the same folder -- there's going to a difference of some sort to distinguish the two i.e. a capital letter in the name of one, lower case in the other; or a space character or some other otherwise obscure character.

 

[Mickmac]

Thanks for that, big help, will look into it and let you know if I can fix it.

 

[smvim]

When you're using your Music Player app and using its file display, is there a 'Properties' or 'Info' if you do something like long-pressing a file to reveal a contextual menu? If yes, do that with two of those duplicated files if it shows you the file path where each file is located.
An example might be Internal/Android/musicplayer/downloads/Pink Floyd for one file and Internal/Android/musicplayer/downloads/Pink_Floyd for the other file. There could be two files with the exact same name but located in two different folders.

 

[B. Diddy]

Another reason I asked is because file managers might also show an "emulated" directory that looks like a duplicate, but is actually just the same directory with the same files.