Q: what does the dotted circle mean?

I had the gray circle on the Ipod touch (IOS8) tracks after I copied the songs from my desktop. They play on the desktop not the ipod. My solution was to go to the 'on this ipod', delete the playlist that had the problem AND delete the tracks from the the music list on the ipod. Copied the playlist again and it worked..

OMG thank you thank you! I've been struggling with this for days. Your solution of unchecking & rechecking has finally sorted me out where all else had failed. Still don't know why, but thanks a million!!!

Thank you!! This did it!!!

THANK YOU SOOOOOOO MUCH! This helped me. Especially after trying to find a solution to the problem, it ended up taking like 2 or 3 hours.... and nothing worked. and then I tried the thing you found, and it actually worked. I can't thank you enough for finding this solution...... If anyone else I know ends up suffering the same problem, I will DEFINITELY refer to your post here ;D. Anyways, I owe you haha. I had wanted to transfer like 162 songs or something to my iPod, but the computer was acting like a moron, and first iTunes just stopped working completely, and then I couldn't load the songs, blah blah blah. But you helped me to fix my problem. Thank you.

Nope, it's been hours since I've tried to move one lousy song to my iPhone and iPad.  Nothing suggested here has worked for me.  Why in the world is this SO FREAKING DIFFICULT.  People have been complaining about this for months! Can't it be fixed once and for all.

Pulling my hair!!!!!!

I have enough hard drive space and I have manually sync music selected. I am also getting the greyed out circles when I try to just transfer the songs to my iTunes library...I don't understand. I am sync my phone now with the sync button, but why won't the tracks show up in my iTunes library?

I tried manually synching but the dotted circles remain EVEN THOUGH in fact the songs DO play on my iPod (just testing them , good so far) This is a fault and needs fixing.

anyway You SHOULD be able to right click or double click or hover and get relevant info  but no such luck. Bad design. C'mon Apple you're better than this

Apple is not here. This is a user to user technical support forum. To fix the issue in iTunes, delete the items and re-download them from the iTunes Store as follows:

Go to the iTunes Music Library and click on the Songs view

Select the items that have the dotted circles

Click on Song in the top menu and then on Delete

Delete the items

Go to the iTunes Music Store

Click on Purchased

Click on Not in My Library

Click on the Cloud to re-download the items you deleted

Best of luck,

GB