Why are playlists breeding like rabbits on my device? I use Banshee 2.2 to synchronize music and podcasts to my Android 2.3 device. On the device, I'm using PowerAMP to play music.

When I open PowerAMP and look at the playlists, each one is repeated a dozen times. So, for example, I have a playlist called "Pop". After a dozen syncs with my computer, I now have 12 playlists called "Pop". 11 are empty, and one has the actual playlist in it.

At first I thought this was a problem with PowerAMP, but since I have tried the Android default music player and a few other music apps, the problem is repeated no matter what I use to play music. So it seems this isn't an app specific problem, but a system wide one.

I have scoured the onboard memory and the SD card, but I have no idea where the playlists are stored. (Note my phone is not rooted, nor do I intend to.)

How do I clear out the empty playlists and stop this behaviour?
This sounds to me like a similar problem I have had with duplicating images in the gallery. I fixed this by clearing the gallery data, and allowing it to rebuild next time the media scanner ran.

I would suggest trying the same technique. I would imagine that whereas I deleted the data from the Gallery App, you should try clearing data from the stock Android Music Player, or failing that from PowerAMP.

Settings-Applications-Manage Applications-All-Gallery-Clear data (confirm). This doesn't delete your media itself, just the database that details where the media is. The media scanner will rebuild this database automatically next time it scans.

It would be prudent to backup your phone contents before you try this.