What does the dotted grayed out circle in on this iPhone/iPad mean?

Same here. A lot of duplicated appear in iTunes viewing my iPads music, iTunes match activated. I assume this related to items not downloaded or sorted into the music catalogue correctly. I do also assume that this is the 4GB space or part of it apearing as "other" in the memory usage overview - the colorful bar.

iOS 6.01, iTunes 11 on Win7

I am having this issue too. Below is a screen grab from the "On this iPhone" section. Three songs that are already on my iPhone also show as duplicated and grayed out with dotted circles next to them. Have no idea what it means...

I had this same issue today. Managed to fix it by downloading one of those iPhone file explorer programs (iExplorer in this case) and deleting the contents of the Purchases folder. Obviously you would want to do a backup before trying this just in case.

nightmare of a time with this one.

sorted it on my iphone4. there was a few tracks that did not have album artwork correct. highlight the whole album, and right click for get info, and when you get to the info paste the album artwork into the album artwork window that is left open. now drag and drop. worked for me!!

no help from apple though!

Deselect the songs from your iphone then delete them.

Sync it.

Then pull the songs from you computer and add it to your iPhone play list.

Sync it.

Done.

Hi Morac and all:

First go to the 'On This iPad/iPod/iPhone' section and note all the tracks that have dotted circles.

In the 'Music' section, un-check/de-select all the tunes noted

Apply and sync the changes.

Once that completes re-check/re-select the same tunes just un-checked/de-selected in the 'Music' section.

Apply and sync the changes again

Go back into the 'On This iPad/iPod/iPhone' section

Hopefully all the dotted circles will be gone and all the tracks can be played

This would apply to any item that has the circle. Once you have un-checked/de-selected them for the first sync, you can re-check them and re-sync and you should be back in business.

There is no need to delete anything - just un-check, sync, re-check, sync....

Cheers,

GB

I've tried Gail's suggestion and it's still giving me the dotted circles. I've even gone as far as restoring the iPad mini and reloaded everything from scratch. It appears it only applies to my voice memos that were synced from my iPhone. I haven't yet investigated deeper to see if it affects other media files.

I have all relevant settings checked. The sync appears to go thru but the results are files with the dotted circle (in iTunes) and nothing on the iPad itself. 3rd party tools "sees" the files on the iPad but once downloaded, results in 0KB files.

Does anyone have any ideas how to sync voice memo files successfully onto the iPad?

I downloaded one of the file explorer programs (iFunbox in my case) for my PC and deleted everything out of the "Purchases" folder on the phone's "Raw File System". After a couple of syncs with iTunes everything was back to normal. It appears that something was screwed up on the iPhone side that iTunes couldn't sort out. I don't think anything could sync from iTunes to the phone, not just the greyed out items.

This is why resetting and restoring the iPhone also works for a lot of people. It's overkill though, deletes your app data, and just wastes your time setting everything back up after the restore. Better to use the surgical approach of a file system explorer program on your PC to fix what appears to be a mundane data corruption issue.

I had this issue as well, but it's a but different to resolve when you use iTunes Match. You can't sync the ringtones, since it will disable iTunes Match and sync the music as well.

What I did was this:

1. Go into the Tones section of the iPhone from inside iTunes

2. Delete the grayed out songs from this section.

3. Go to the Tones section of iTunes and drag the Tones back into the iPhone.

After I dragged the ringetone back into the phone, it was showing up in my Sound Settings again, with no damage done to my iTunes Match set up.

Happy troubleshooting!

Jerrills method worked for me.

I had to sync my phone 5 or 6 times after deleting the files. The first few syncs were very fast and didn't appear to do anything, but then it kicked in and everything works fine now!

Before iTunes was ignoring loads of my music and was giving me 11 errors. Afterwards only 2 of the 11 errors still came up and all the other music synced perfectly.

Cheers Jerrill!

No no no. All this is just guessing. This is the way to do it:

Open iTunes

go to Music

Choose song

right click and choose info

set time of play you want e.g., start 0 sec and stop 20 sec and make sure you click boxes.

close choose info box.

Right click on song and choose create aac file.

It will be created in same folder

right click on new acc file. Open it in windows explorer. it will have .m4a extension, rename file to have extension .m4r

save it despite warning and LEAVE THE WINDOWS EXPLORER folder open

back in iTunes choose Tones

Drag the new *.m4r file to tones

NOW HERE IS THE CRUCIAL PART....

Drag the file to the right side of iTUNES screen, You should already have your iPhone connected. You will

see the devices tab open up and just drop the file in the iPhone. VOILA! It has worked 100% of the time without fail for over 30 ringtones.

Ciao

Would also like to add that the clip has to be less than 30 seconds, or else you get an error message.

Yes. Thank you for adding that note. I really think this is a sure path. I just added another 10 ringtones this way

Yep, I learned about the 30 second rule from another site awhile back.

Ever notice all the ringtones in the iTunes store are 30 seconds or less?