Manually manage music + import .m3u playlist to iphone 5 = duplicate songs

hello,
I tried searching the forums for a related questions but didn't find any. if it exists let me know.
i have a iphone 5 (ios 6) and a ipod 2g (ios 4.2). I use itunes on windows and manage both devices manually for music and videos. Now I have a playlist in WMP which I exported as a .m3u file.
In itunes, I can import the playlist and it shows up under the 'playlists' correctly. Now I wanted to transfer this playlist to my ipod and iphone (note: my ipod and iphone already have all the songs in the playlist plus many others. I never use them in 'sync' mode).
I was under the impression that a playlist is just a list of pointers to songs and not songs themselves. So when I drag the playlist into the ipod within itunes, it creates a new playlist with that name on the ipod and correctly transfers the pointers onto the ipod. the playlist works perfectly on the ipod and there and no duplicate songs.
now with the new iphone 5 and new ios 6, something seems to be different. when i drag the playlist into the iphone, it does create a new playlist but it copies all the songs again, even though the exact songs (all metadata identical since they're from the same physical source on my harddisk - album, artists, art, title, etc). so it creates duplicates of these songs.
now the still tougher part. I tunes apparently has a find duplicates feature. But it onyl seem to work for music imported into itunes library. It is greyed out if you click on the iphone and then try to find duplicates (if iphone is set to manually manage music.)
so is this expected behaviour? I think this is a bug in the new ios since the drag drop playlist manually works perfectly in ios 4.2.
any thoughts?

Unfortunately, you'll need to 'start fresh,' as it were. However, you could transfer your library from the old computer and sync. This MAY keep you from having to erase everything. Worst case scenario, if you transfer your library, though, would be to wipe it and then load the same content right back on.
iTunes: How to move your music to a new computer

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