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What does the dotted circle mean?

Come on Apple, people keep asking this and you don't answer! What does the dotted circle beside certain music showing on iTunes mean? The music is meant to be on my iPhone, and shows as downloaded, but skips over - and in iTunes, it shows with a grey dotted circle beside it. iTunes is the only application that I've ever dealt with that uses symbols with no indication of what those symbols mean - get your act together guys!

Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Dec 5, 2012 12:28 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 14, 2017 4:22 PM

At a guess the cause is an uncompleted sync operation which leaves the records about what has and has not been transferred in an inconsistent state. Ideally iTunes would gracefully tidy up during the next sync, but it doesn't. 😕



Try the following all-purpose steps for dealing with erratic device or sync behaviour. They assume that all of the content you want on the device is in your library ready for restoring. If it isn't see Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device first. I would also recommend you copy everything out of the camera roll if you haven't already.


  1. Backup device.
  2. Restore as a new device.
  3. Restore the backup you made earlier.


Use an encrypted backup if you want to preserve passwords, Wi-Fi settings, web history and health data where appropriate. I also suggest syncing with a selection of playlists (unless you're using iCloud Music Library) rather than manually adding content as, if nothing else, the process above is easier to do if you ever have to go through it again.


tt2

138 replies

What does the dotted circle mean?

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