Can't delete songs from my iPhone 4

OMG...you don't delete from ITunes...if you find the arrow near your IPhone name, click on the arrow, and find the item that says music. This is not the word music near the top of the column, it's under the name of your IPhone. If you delete songs from the list that comes up there, you are NOT deleting anything from your ITunes account, only from you Iphone.. If you are deleting from your ITunes account then you are totally not following the directions. This is not rocket science!

I have finally managed to delete what I'll term "ghost songs" from itunes/Music on my iPhone 4. All the various attempts to unsync / sync / manually manage / selected playlists etc etc took off all but 600 or so duplicates that stubbornly remained on the iphone. They may or may not have *really* been there, but they appeared to be, album artwork etc, which was bad enough.

What I did was use iExplore to view the contents of the iPhone. Navigate down Media > iTunes_Control > iTunes and manually delete the 12-15 files in there (iTunesPrefs.plist, MediaLibrary.sqlitedb-wal etc). These are essentially itunes' records of what it thinks should be here.

Power off and turn on your iPhone and all those Ghost Songs should finally be gone.

After deleting the phone is seen as a NEW phone. Not to worry as long as your phone has your latest apps onborad, they;ll then re-backup as a new phone. I called my new phone the same thing as it was before, no issues so far.

Hope this helps.

I tried something that I found in a macrumors forum...

Go to settings>general>useage>music and swipe to delete.

Do this, then restart your phone. It worked for me.

Great info. Easily solved my problem.

Thx!

Finally after hours of work the problem has been resolved! Thanks a lot iUser619, you are a lifesaver. No need to restore now

iUser619...you are my savor for real! Spent hours upon hours trying to fix this bs and you provided the simplest yet correct way to fix our problem. I felt your pain zblom, therealcbar and mogmachine. Thanks again IUser!

My songs have doubled. I keep checking all my songs and it keeps doubling up.

I untick Music and it still doesnt get rid of it and nearly at the end of syncing Itunes it stops responding.

I too had this problem. Every song that was in a playlist showed as a duplcate under the artist and was using an extra 4Gb of space on my iPhone.

I tried everything I could think of but when I unchecked Sync Music the only songs that disappeared were ones I had bought through iTunes (only abut 2Gb of 17!).

This was only a problem on my iPhone - my iPad 2 was fine (although only had a small music selection on it).

I was very reluctant to restore so kept researching.

After reading right through this thread the info from iUser619 did the trick. Thank you so much!!! My phone is back to where it was with no duplication.

Give this a try- I was just having this problem, just did some troubleshooting, & found a fix.

Pretty sure this is caused by the cloud syning, automatic downloads, and transfers while syncing.

1. 1st put all the songs you want to delete in a playlist.
2. Uncheck them all.
3. Go to the iPhone summary tab. Scroll down- sync only checked songs and videos. Sync.
4. Check the iPhone they should be gone, then delete them from the itunes library.

Do it in that order and you should be good to go.

-Eden

as i was nearing the end of this thread, i was about to give up and restore. cheers dude for posting that, mucho appreciata!!!!!!

Sure thing- if that doesn't work I realized I missed a step.

After step 3 also check "manually manage songs" > go to the drop down list to the left for your phone (under devices list) and manually delete the songs you want gone.

Then go ahead and do step 4. Once the songs are gone from iTunes library go back and uncheck "manually manage songs" and sync.

If it worked like I said before then sweet, don't worry about the above. I just figured I'd include that I case.

when you want to delete the songs by syncronizing will you lose all your apps?

No, here's why:

The way to lose your apps is by restoring the phone and setting up as a new phone, or going into the apps tab and I checking the sync box.

What you want to do is stay in the main iPhone/ipod touch tab (To get to the iphone tab find the devices drop down in the list of iTunes libraries, playlists, links, etc on the far left of the iTunes window. Then choose the farthes left tab, where you normally go to check for iPhone/ipod touch updates.)

Scroll down you'll find a cluster kind of like a check list. In there somewhere is "manually manage songs/videos" check that box.

That's where you want to start. Once youre there refer to my earlier post.

(At the risk of repeating myself: Once you're manually managing you can go straigh to your idevice and swipe the songs you want to delete to delete them. Then delete them from your library. Then go uncheck the "manually manage" box and sync again.)

when I press that "maually manage music and video" or whatever it says, it says it will earse stuff off my iphone and i DONT want it to do that!? what should i do because right now it wont let me delete nor press the little checks next to the songs so i CAN delete songs i want to be deleted...

????

Carlaaayx3

You need to make sure iTunes and iPhone are fully up to date with their software. Click on itunes in the menu bar up top and choose check for updates. Go to the iPhone main tab to check for updates to your phone or ipod. Restart the program. Plug in the device.

Go and check manually manage. If it prompts you to erase anything just push cancel and try again, it may be trying to sync with a different library, i don't know enough since I'm not there. Make sure you are NOT syncing. Cancel any syncing thats going on,

If it still wont let you manually manage without erasing then just go ahead and erase- if all of the music is in your library. Once you have the songs deleted from the ipod/iphone AND the library then you can go back and choose to sync the device under the music tab.

Even if you have to re-sync it shouldn't take too long the wifi sync is super fast (for me it averages about 1000 songs every 30 seconds). So just go for it, since it syncs over wifi do it while your at home so you arent stuck.