what does the dotted circle mean?

I had the same issue on my iPhone 4. Two songs on my iPhone would not play. Those two songs listed under iTunes had dotted circles. After reading all the retard suggestions like uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes, renaming files under roaming/appdata, I knew there was an easier way. All I simply did was this... In iTunes under Music, I unchecked Sync Music. A message indicates you are about to delete all music on the iPhone. I concurred, and clicked Apply. All the music was deleted. I rechecked Sync Music, selected all the music I wanted, and clicked apply. The dotted circles were gone in iTunes, and all the music played on my iPhone. It seems by deleting all the music and reloading it gets the music "back in sync."

Hi,

found a solution:

You have to double check that sync music manually is checked!

Then you have to uncheck and delete the songs with dotted circles AND the ones which are ok and working from this list.

Don't sync now! Instead add these songs again from your media list!

Your circles should now be filling and these songs should be added correctly!

Regards,

Andi

hey guys i Found the solution to the problem. when you click on the song in stead of adding it to the playlist it should give an option to add to device. click on that and add it to the playlist in your device. worked for me 😀

I have half-transferred songs on my iTunes. Beside these song names, I have grey dotted circle lines. I want to delete it by using the right click but it does not sow me any options of deleting. Do I have to go to my summary tab on iTunes to change your settings to "Manually manage music and videos"????????????? Cus when I right click it, it only gives me three options of "Play", "Get Info" and "Show in iTunes store".

If I click manually manage, it says my iPhone is synced with another library, and it can only be synced with one library at a time so erasing and syncing these contents would replace the contents of this iPhone with this iTunes library. Do I go ahead with it? I have two iTunes library though!! 😟

I have half-transferred songs on my iTunes. Beside these song names, I have grey dotted circle lines. I want to delete it by using the right click but it does not sow me any options of deleting. Do I have to go to my summary tab on iTunes to change your settings to "Manually manage music and videos"????????????? Cus when I right click it, it only gives me three options of "Play", "Get Info" and "Show in iTunes store".

If I click manually manage, it says my iPhone is synced with another library, and it can only be synced with one library at a time so erasing and syncing these contents would replace the contents of this iPhone with this iTunes library. Do I go ahead with it? I have two iTunes library though!! 😟

I found an easier solution! The infamous grey dotted circle means the songs/media have not been transferred to your device, probably because of lack of storage space.

Connect your device via USB, open iTunes and select your device. Go to the Music tab at the top (Summary; Info; Apps; Tones; Music; etc.)

In the Music tab, go to Playlists on the left. Uncheck the problematic playlist. Press Apply at the bottom. Sync your device. Recheck the the problem playlist and press Sync. All playlist tracks will now sync if you have space on your device, you will see the circles spin and fill to black before disappearing!

No need to delete, reimport, etc. 😀

Thank you Waterlilly101 this really helped!!!!!!!!

Yay, it worked! It wasn't just one trick that did it. I tried everyone's ideas. Eventually it worked but I don't know exactly how I did it. 😕

Okay, so I had a few sogns that had the dotted circles, so I read through a ton of these threads about what it means and how to fix it. I ended up taking all of my music off of my phone. I started with having 2 songs with the dotted circles to 7.

Unlike most I am not trying to get them to play, I just am trying to get them to go away. I figured out that if I went to the itunes store on my phone and redownloaded the songs wiith the circles on my computer that they would go away. Problem is, I do not want any of the 7 on my phone. I manually sync my songs, so i take the ones that I finally got the dotted circle to go away on, and delete them from my iphone. All of them just revert back to being grayed out and having the circles away.

I have both free space on my computer and my iphone so that's nothing to do with it.

FYI! I've been trying to get rid of the first 2 songs for a while now, and ended up fixing one, but while I was trying to fix the other one, I ended up resorting to deleting all the songs and restoring my phone. And then that is when 5 more started doing it. So I don't want to touch it or really break any more, but it's just annoying, when for the most part I only just do not want the songs listed.

this helped me so much thanks for all the replies i got mine working again

I tried the technique as described by smithbmj on April 2, 2013 and it worked beautifully for my iPhone 5. As recommended, I deleted all the music from my phone, and then resynched. There are still some songs in the "On This iPhone" listing that have the dotted circles, but at least all the songs are now playing on my iPhone 5. Yay!

Thank you, smithbmj! :-)

This has certainly been trial and error, and I found this solution to work with the addition of clicking on "manually manage music and videos." After doing this, I also uncheched sync music and videos which cleared my iPad. I then went back to selecting what I wanted to sync, and it is not syncing both music and videos to the iPad 2 using the latest OS and itunes version.

Easiest solution i just found. in the list of songs "on your iphone" with the dotted circles, uncheck one of the songs, and then recheck it. it will take a second to think, and then begin syncing all the songs that are greyed out / dotted circles. 😀

I tried lots of the recommended solutions, but was able to resolve the problem of the dotted circles by initiating a sync from my iPhone. On the phone, I went to Settings, General, iTunes Wi-Fi Sync, Sync Now. I hope this may help some others.

I have tried the things you suggest yet still nothing happens.

I copy the files I want to over to my iPhone from my iTunes collection, and it just sits there with the dotted circle next to it.

Looking at my picture could somebody please explain to me why this is happening?

Bare in mind that the file in question is 211.6 mb and then look at the space I have on my iPhone!

Since when did it become an absolute pain in the arse to transfer music to my iPhone?

I don't sync anything and have the "Manually manage music andvideos" box checked.

I am also trying to do this with my iPhone plugged in, not over wifi.