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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
I HAVE FIXED IT. i think.
Open itunes and plug in your device.
Make sure you stop your device from syncing by clicking the little x where the music player is.
Go to your device and go to the summary tab.
Scroll down and make sure the "Automatically sync when this Iphone is connected" is uncheck.
Click apply.
Now, close itunes.
Re-open itunes and make sure you keep your device is plugged in.
Go to your device and go to music under my device.
Take the songs you want on your phone and either drag and drop, or copy and paste them in.
That worked for me, I hope this resolves any problems :O
When I downgraded to 8.2 from 8.3 on my iPhone 5s (in order to fix the issue of 8.3 not connecting consistently to my car stereo when physically connecting [Bluetooth worked ok]), I had the problem that my music disappeared and I could no longer sync (dotted circle). I tried every solution I read on the web and in the Apple forums. Despairing not being able to listen to my podcasts on my long drive from Houston to Dallas, I refreshed my old iPod Touch and iTunes synced perfectly. Because some of the solutions presumed that something was wrong with iTunes and I had just moved my music to a new MacBook Pro, the sync to the iPod Touch proved that the problem was not inside my recently-moved iTunes Libraries. I even tried to restore from backup with no luck.
My solution was to use iFunBox for the Mac to delete the iTunes files inside the raw filesystem. When I reconnected to iTunes, it invited me to restore from backup or treat the phone as new. I restored from (recent) backup and music synced without issue. I can only assume that in the downgrade process, some data/files inside the secret Apple non-public iOS file system had become corrupted and deleting/restoring fixed it.
As with all things in life, YMMV.
you are amazing and perfect for sharing that, thank you!
This helped me so much! I have had problems with my library since Christmas and have finally resolved them thanks to genius people like you.
my grey dotted circles happen to be an album i purchased on my phone. they won't show up on my iTunes for some reason. please get it together
This is what worked for me too, none of the other solutions presented made any difference. My itunes library was also acting strangely, I had recently moved to a new computer and I think that is where the issue was. Clearly some corrupted database entries, once I deleted the files in the iTunes folder on my phone and resynced, it worked.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Checking the box worked!
I was having the same problem and had no idea what to do, so i went online to look for a solution and after countless hours of looking for what to do i finally fixed it by turning off my phone, and my mac; then i turned them both back on and as soon as i went to sync them it started to work again by itself.
This issue is resolved after upgrading to iOS 9.1. Now I can sync my songs without any issue from iTunes to my iOS devices.
thank you so much it helped me 😀
I use "Manually manage music and videos" check box setting under OPTIONS and was able to correct the problem by clicking the iPhone icon, SUMMARY and then the SYNC button at the bottom.
I was also "converting higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps ACC" to help reduce the track size to fit more on my 16GB iPhone 5s. For some reason there were a few tracks that it wouldn't let me reduce (perhaps purchased tracks?) so I unchecked that under OPTIONS and clicked SYNC again and it worked!
All this worked after I restored my iPhone to factory defaults, copied some music just to make sure it worked, then restored from a backup I made just prior to using the RESTORE iPHONE button.
Nailed it. I followed the part that has you go in and rename your AppleComputer file "SyncSettings" and that fixed on the spot. Thanks!
Thanks. Same thing for me. Unplug phone from cable. Turn off Wifi. Plug phone in. Click sync in iTunes.
Thanks This was the issue for me, I bought the songs but did not have enough space to store or sync them when I connected to ITunes. I transferred the purchases to iTunes and could play them there but not on the iPhone. After reading this post I decided to turn of Sync All Audiobooks and unchecked everything including the (Purchased) box at the bottom window titled Include Audiobooks from Playlists. Once that completed I reloaded just what I wanted and everything works fine.
Thanks Waterlilly101!
YEEeeeaaAAaSSS. Thank u!... And i tried like everything else, sooo... Thank u!!
What does the dotted circle mean?
