Q: "Phantom" songs appearing in "Music" (iPhone) but nothing on the device?

Hopefully the fix sticks after using iExplorer.  For me, things are still good.

This worked for me.  I did the renames of the sqlitedb files, but when I re-booted the phone and connected to iTunes, the ghost music was still there.  (I had 243 ghost tracks on my phone)  However, when I cleared out the contents of the Purchased folder, the ghost songs went away.  Now I know how to fix this, but I hope it doesn't come back.

Thank you, SO much! Deleting the medialibrary.sqlitedb didn't fix it, but deleting that "Purchases" folder did. Thank you. That was driving me crazy!!

Thank you! How did you found out about iExplorer? Anyways, you saved me a lot of time and another long, irritating, torchering restore. 10 points for you!

I struggled with this issue for several days. Finally used iFunbox to get at the file system of my iPad (3rd gen, iOS7) and deleted all the .plist files from "Purchases." Bingo! No more greyed-out files. I can't promise this will work for you, YMMV and all that, try at your own risk, if at all.

SFUser1 you are genuis! I had this same issue and took me 3 days to find this solution. Thank you very much!!

Simply go to (on iOS 7)

Settings > iTunes & App Store

Tap the Apple ID field

Tap Sign Out

disconnect and reconnect your iOS device from itunes

Look at what is on the device and you should no longer see the phantom items.

Proceed to sign back into your Apple ID on the device in the same settings.

No need to use a third party tool to try and resolve such a simple problem.

I was having major issues with "ghost" tracks appearing on my iphone in intunes but my iphone showing there was nothing there. I was also dealing with the available storage showing on my iphone not matching up with what showed on itunes. My suspision was that something was amis, I had some 6+ GB of stuff in yellow as "other" which seemed crazy to me. I followed GeekDad3's instructions and was able to make the available storage on itunes and my phone match...and it freed up a HUGE amount of space on my iphone. As I suspected something was way wrong. But I still had the issue of these "ghost" tracks in itunes. I then went to the Purchased folder (using the application suggested by GeekDad3) and deleted everything, restarted both my iphone and itunes and tada! Problem solved! I hope it doesn't come back but I am so relieved after hours and hours of working on this!

OK, here's how I just solved my problem with "ghost" tracks, after much frustration. It's a meld of the suggestions described by GeekDad3 and by SFUser1.

Resolution Steps:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac.
2. Perform a back-up to your local computer rather than iCloud if practical.  This will be quicker in the event of issues.
3. Disconnect your iPhone from your Mac.
4. Download PhoneView (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/) which will allow you to directly access the file structure of the device. (NOTE: For the operations being performed here, you can use the demo version of PhoneView.)
5. Open up PhoneView.
6. Click on "Settings" in the toolbar. Enable the Advanced View mode so the entire disk structure is accessible.
7. Delete the Purchases directory.
   
8. Disconnect your iPhone from your Mac.
9. Hold down POWER and HOME on your iOS device until the Apple logo appears.  Release both buttons.
10. When device has rebooted, connect to iTunes and synchronize it.

Ghosts gone! I have matching song counts on my Mac and on my iPhone!

I think that what you see is a record of what you have played.  Try these experiments:

1.  Download an album.

2.  On your computer, hook the phone and on iTunes look at the bar across the bottom that shows what is on the iPhone and note the amount of space Music takes up..

3.  Delete the album.

4.  Go back and note how much space has been taken up by audio.

5.  Write it down.

THEN, play an album without downloading it.

1.  Hook up the phone to iTunes and not the amount of space taken up by audio.  I think you will find that the space is the same as in point #4 above.

I think that Apple's instructions and advice is not clear.  The music shows up, but only in the form of metadata (?).

If you go further, downloading and then deleting the offending albums or songs so as to not have the appearance of downloaded music show up, you will find that there was nothing there in the first place.

I think I have figured it out. 

If you have an app such as "Battery Doctor ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battery-doctor-must-have-battery/id615987910?mt= 8 )" that cleans and optimizes your iPhone, or if you have an app that will clean up junk, memory and cache files, run the app.  Those phantom files then disappear.

I plugged my iPhone into the computer and noted the size of each file.

I then streamed an album.

The file sizes remained the sam.

I switched to Airplane mode.

The music was still there and playable.

I ran Battery Doctor and cleared out the caches.

Voila!  The phantom files disappeared.

That worked for many people, Violaap.

But, it also doesn't work for many people--including me. I've been dealing with the 'greyed-out songs' syncing over and over again for months. None of the solutions worked for me here or elsewhere worked, until I finally stumbled onto: http://superuser.com/questions/555938/song-greyed-out-in-itunes-not-visible-on-i phone

I came here today to post that link, but decided to search 'plist' to see if someone had already covered it. The link above basically documents what SFUser1 suggests.

Simply, I used iExplorer on my PC to delete StorePurchasesInfo.plist on my iPhone 6 Plus and the problem is solved.

I was always able to delete the greyed-out songs form the iPhone, but they would return every time I connected the phone to iTunes (even with manual sync, etc.--see all the other solutions).

I hope this post validates another solution and gives hope to those with this issue.

JP

YES, it works.

Here is exactly what I did:

1. In my iPhone, I deleted all of the music: Settings>General>Usage>Storage Management>Music and modify>All songs
2. Using iExplorer, I went inside "Media/Purchases" and deleted everything inside. Things inside this folder had definitely to do with ghost tracks seen in iTunes.
3. Then I just launch another music synchronization in iTunes, without selecting any playlist (0 music to sync) so to check whether those ghost tracks had disappear...and they've all gone!
4. No need to reboot the device.

Thanks a lot SFUser1

This worked for me! (He says more than 3 years after this post was written.  But hey, isn't it cool that I could find this in 2016 to help me with this problem?)