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)
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.
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
I had this problem too. After lots of attempted fixes, it's now working again. One of these things - I think probably the second one - fixed it:
1. I used the Battery Doctor app on my iPod Touch to clean up cache and boost memory.
2. I ejected my iPod Touch from iTunes and then reconnected it.
One of the things that I also noticed while I was having the dotted circle problem was that when I selected my device in iTunes, the horizontal graph showing the breakdown of memory usage categorized everything as 'other' or 'free'. After I did the two things above, the graph went back to showing all the relevant categories ('audio', 'photos', 'apps', 'documents and data', 'other', 'free'), and music syncing worked again.
This completely fixed my problem! I had enough storage and couldn't figure out why albums wouldn't transfer. I didn't have the "manage manually" box checked. Thank you!!!
I select the songs I don't want then hit the delete key, then it comes up with a pop up asking if I want to delete them. I hit enter and they are gone.
What does the dotted circle mean?
