Why is ringtone in limbo in iTunes and missing from iPhone after last iOS 6 update?

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Why is ringtone in limbo in iTunes and missing from iPhone after last iOS 6 update?

I have a ringtone that I purchased that has now disappeared from my iPhone 5 after the last iOS 6 update. If I look in iTunes (which is an abomination in itself and not intuitive in any way), in the On This iPhone tab of the iPhone page, with Tones selected on the left hand side menu,

I see the ringtone "Stewie Mom Mom Mom" grayed out with a weird circle to the left of it . I have a second ringtone that is also visible there, with no weird circle.

If I go to the Tones tab of the iPhone page, I see that Sync Tones is checked and it shows 1 tone synched...the one without the weird circle shown in Tones.jpg is actually on my iPhone, so that is the 1 tone. No matter what I do to try to manually sync the tones to my iPhone, Stewie Mom Mom Mom is never copied to the iPhone.

Can somebody please tell me how to get this orphan ringtone back on my iPhone? What does the weird circle mean? I've gone to the iTunes store on my phone and also in the iTunes app on my computer and in both places when I view the ringtone in the store, it's acting like I never purchased it. It's not like $1.29 is so much that I wouldn't pay for the ringtone again, but honestly I don't trust that the ringtone won't be orphaned again and again, and I'm not just going to keep buying it over and over. HELP!

iPhone 5, Windows Vista

Posted on Feb 7, 2013 10:09 AM

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Answer 1

vincetg2

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Feb 20, 2013 9:46 PM in response to achildress

This happened to me to.

It took me a while to figure out a solution, but this may or may not work for you.

Long story short, previous versions of iTunes used the Ringtones folder to store all tones, but now iTunes uses the Tones folder.

(I had copied my library of music from one computer to another, where the old computer used an older version of iTunes. I assume most users aren't affected by this, because they normally just upgrade iTunes on their primary computer, and the upgrade process probably takes care of renaming the Ringtones folder to Tones)

For example, my media folder is set to be:

C:\Users\vincetg2\Music

so all my old tones files were in:

C:\Users\vincetg2\Music\Ringtones

but iTunes was expecting them to be in:

C:\Users\vincetg2\Music\Tones

To solve this, I moved all the files in the 'old' Ringtones folder to the 'new' Tones folder (you should create it if it's not already there):

then dragged the files into iTunes' Tones section:

and then synced (erase and sync) the tones over to my iPhone:

I hope this helps!

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