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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
jack4120 wrote:
Had this problem for the first time today but I just got a 5S
I am synching itunes 11 to iPhone 5s - all non-purchased music (but legally ripped) that I had imported into itunes on a PC. Originally clicked manually manage and sync only checked songs..
If you are manually managing, ticking Sync only checked songs does nothing at all.
What do you mean by drag it over to the music on your phone..... I checked the "manually manage music and videos" button but nothing changed! I can't download any of my new songs! I just got the new Katy Perry CD and it won't download to my phone! I really want the music but it isn't working! 😠
yeah i just stumbled upon this mess this morning updating playlists...
apple is loosing touch..
after multiple syncs i came over to this forum.. had to register and all..
none of the ways above worked for me in the past half an hour.
WHAT WORKED FOR ME: i manually dragged one song from my itunes music libraty to my iphone. magically, after it synced this single song, it started pulling other songs from my mac to my iphone.
oh yeah.. i dont have manual box checked.
Please mark this question as solved so that other people can know and find the answer if they have the same problem.
ffiti wrote:
Please mark this question as solved so that other people can know and find the answer if they have the same problem.
MikeKirkham cannot mark it as solved.
Only the original poster (vancouverbrit) can mark it as solved and he only posted once (this thread, last December)
My bad, I replied to the wrong person.
Please mark this question as solved so that other people can know and find the answer if they have the same problem.
vancouverbrit has not been here for over 10 months.
what finally solved it for me- and FYI i dont like having the sync music button checked because i have to many playlist and so forth so i like to manage my music myself- anyways i checked the songs with the dotted circles in my library and then clicked the sync only checked songs box under summary tab- and BOOM finally applause transferred over- got the idea at this link http://http://appducate.com/2012/12/troubleshoot-an-ios-device-that-wont-sync-in -itunes/ hope this helps-
tiffyt wrote:
what finally solved it for me- and FYI i dont like having the sync music button checked because i have to many playlist and so forth
So why not leave it checked and simply sync selected playlists?
I know there are a few valid fixes but it all depends on what the issue is.
For me it took me a while to figure it out. Aside from the grey dotted circles in "my music", I saw all these cloud symbols with a arrow down in my iphone on random songs. iCLOUD!
I turned off iCloud back up in the summary screen in itunes when I synced my phone and everything started downloading again and went into my settings into my iphone to make sure iTunes Match was turned off including automatic downloads. iCloud is such a piece of crap!
Can someone explain how to fix this darn thing? I've tried everything that everyone has mentioned, but I found no fix. It started happening almost a week for me with my iPod touch 5th gen. I thought maybe it's the memory because I only have about a megabyte left of memory(my iPod is 64 mb's, by the way). That should be plenty of space to download the songs though, so I don't see it being a memory problem. I updated it to 7.0.3 a few hours ago thinking that might work, but nothing. It's frustrating because I listen to music through-out my day everyday and I have about 5 new albums I wanted to put on my iPod to listen to, and I hate having to stay at the computer to listen to them. I also noticed that after I started having this problem, when I sync my iPod and it gets to 'Step 5 out of 5', it'll stay on that for almost 10 minutes or more. I hadn't done this before either. I really wish I could get this fixed.
If anyone could tell me a 'step-by-step' solution, that'd be great.
And when I check and uncheck the songs in the itunes library, the memory shown for my ipod with go down and up, so when they stay checked it makes it seem like they're on my iPod because it took off the memory needed to sync the songs, but once again nothing shows up on my iPod under the recently added.
That is a loading simbol
i think
The way I got rid of it all was to turn off itunes match (I no longer use it). When I bought that, and put new songs on my itunes, thats when I got the dotted circles. I had alot of problems with itunes match, so have gone back to the old "sync" way with itunes. Alot faster, and no more dotted circles. Wasted my money on itunes match, but oh well, the old way is alot better with no probs. Try that if you have itunes match, that could be the problem. Good luck :)
What does the dotted circle mean?
