Why are both my iPod and iPhone syncing the same stuff over and over again?

[Feek]

I have an iPod touch and an iPhone and I've always had a situation where they've synced more than they should, but it's starting to get silly.

Up until a week or so ago, I'd sync the touch and 20-30 songs would get copied onto it. They're already there but they'd copy again. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

Earlier this week, this number increased to about 70 songs. Odd.

Now I sync the touch and about 150 songs are being copied to it.

I can sync it, remove it from the dock, connect it straight back and they all get synced again. This is obviously somewhat time consuming and frustrating.

Exactly the same happens with my iPhone.

I'm set to automatically sync when device is connected and sync only checked songs and videos.

In the Music tab, I have Sync Music checked along with Selected playlists and under that I have Audiobooks, Purchased and a specific playlist that I put all the music that I want on the devices in. All songs are checked within the main music display.

I went to the extent of removing everything and putting it all back on which took about an hour and a half on the touch (so I still call BS to the guy who says he can completely sync a touch in 20 minutes) but it's doing exactly the same.

Really, it shouldn't be resyncing any stuff that's already on the device. I can understand perhaps it would do it if play counts have changed but to have it happen just if the device is disconnected and reconnected seems a bit silly.

This is with iTunes 8.0.2 on OS X 10.5.5, all fully patched.

iPod touch 1st gen and iPhone 3G.

Any ideas?

 

[Feek]

No, I only sync each device to the same computer/library - What other effects will moving the xml away do, will I lose play counts for example?

/edit - I have two files, an iTunes Music Library.xml and an iTunes Library.xml.

I also have an iTunes Library file with no extension (yes, I have Finder set to show all extensions) which was accessed at 13:33 today and is described in Get Info as 'iTunes Database File'.

My iTunes directory is quite large, holding music, films and TV at 421Gb!

 

[Feek]

Aye, that's what I did, I moved the file away. It still failed so I created two separate playlists, one for each of the devices but that hasn't made any difference.

So you suggest to move out everything from the iTunes directory except iTunes Music (and I assume Album Artwork?) and let it rebuild the database from scratch? What about the Mobile Applications directory? If I move that, don't I lose all my downloaded apps?

 

[Feek]

Right, I've played around further. If I delete everything except the iTunes Music, Album Artwork and Mobile Applications directory then iTunes opens totally empty and the only way I can get everything back into it is to create a new library and let it copy all the old stuff into the new one. That's a bad option. It seems that it can quite happily recreate the xml file but if the database is removed then it just gets understandably grumpy and won't play ball.

I need to verify the database somehow.

 

[Feek]

That's pretty much what I'd decided to do during the day yesterday while I was thinking about it.

So, I got home and copied everything out onto another drive, so that's 500Gb and took two hours. Once done I restarted iTunes with a completely empty library, reset warnings and copied everything back. This took longer than the first two hours as it has to go through analysing all the music and I had to re-flag all the TV shows as TV shows because they defaulted to movies.

Once that was done I put the iPod touch into recovery mode and restored it. I set up a playlist of around 800 songs and synced it out to the device. At this point it was midnight so I disconnected the iPod, reconnected my AppleTV to let it rebuild itself and went to bed!

This morning after I woke up I resynched the iPod. Nothing copied, so that's a good start. Tonight I'll recover/restore the iPhone and see how it goes.