What are these red circle symbols that suddenly appear in my iTunes library on my iPhone?

I Was able to fix this by doing a reboot. All my albums with no metadata work. Try it and let us know!

THANK YOU!! I knew it had to be something so simple but not easily found!!

BEST ANSWER!

Never mind :( I am so ****** off!

I have an identical problem - except in my case it was Megadeth that iTunes doesn't like! (Sabbath posed no problems heh heh!)

Jerry,

Thanks for posting this issue - I have an identical problem, and have spent over 3 hours on the phone with Apple trying to resolve it (it's kinda hard to describe over the phone without visuals!) I had over 18Gb of music on my 4s, all of which appear in my itunes account on the desktop iMac. Most of it is CD imports, but there is also quite a few iTunes purchases. After downloading iOS7, most of the music has disappeared from my iPhone. The songs that are on the phone have the red cirlce & square icon you refer to. Also, the iPhone no longer sync's music to the iMac. Apple's over-the-phone support were unable to find a resolution, having tried all possible solutions.

I have one other item to add into the mix: when I do try to play music on the iPhone (well, what's left of it!), it just flicks through the albums, and won't actually play anything. 😟

In exasperation I showed it to a technician at my local Apple Store. He said that he has heard of this problem very recently, and more cases are coming to light. His suggeston was to do a "full recover" of the iPhone, and restore a previous back-up (ie, pre-iOS7). In his opinion, it is mnost likely caused by a corrupt file which disagrees with iOS7. His solution: delete that file, and then do the full recovery. Then, restore the phone to a recent back-up.😕 I'll give this a go over the next few days!

It is nice to know that I'm not alone! I was starting to question my sanity at one point😝

I was in the same boat with 95% of my music on my iPhone showing the dreaded red square in a circle. Thanks to Jerry's post, I can see how to kick off a download playlist-by-playlist over my wi-fi. But the thought of doing that for all my playlists and for 3500 songs made me cringe big time.😠

So I kept fiddling around. I finally got my whole music library back sync'd. Here's what I *think* did it for me, but it would be good for others to try it themselves and post here if it works:

1. connect to iTunes and let it perform it's initial attempt at a resync

2. while connected to itunes, select your phone under DEVICES so that you see the 'Summary', 'Info', 'Apps', 'Music', etc. buttons at the top of the window.

3. select the 'Music' button from the top to see selections for what you want to sync. Here, I could see all the playlists that I have always had selected (prior to iOS7 upgrade). But it seemed that none of it was actually sync'd to the iPhone. So I checked one additional Genius mix to be added. Then I hit 'Sync' button at the bottom right of the window.

4. Voila! now iTunes started to successfully resync my whole music library.

My theory:

During the iOS7 upgrade of the iPhone, the upgrade process whacked the iPhone's index of music and flagged everything as being on the iCloud rather than actually in files on the phone itself. Doing *something* (anything?) to force iTunes to resync was enough for it to fix the index of music on the phone.

Interestingly, iTunes shows how much space is being used for 'Audio' on the phone. Even when the iPhone thought everything was in the iCloud, it was still using up just as much iPhone space as if the files were still downloaded.

Let me know if this works for anyone else. Good luck! 🙂

Thanks for that suggestion - sadly, it didn't work for me.😟 I thought it might achieve something, but alas iTunes gets to step 6 of 6, then hangs-up. I might have to go the full recovery path. But thatnks for this suggestion!!

I think I have fixed this on my iPhone!! In the end I had to put the phone into recovery mode. I followed these instructions:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/01/08/iphone-recovery-mode/

The music has been resorted back onto my iPhone, and all functions are working normally.

No guarantees that this will solve the problems for other folk here, but this solution was recommended by my Apple Store. Maybe worth a try if all else fails?

The issue seems to be that since the IOS update Itunes is trying to process the whole of the Itunes music library instead of just the stuff being added, So a five minute sync becomes a ten hour sync. So when it appears that nothing is hby appening the user removes the docking cable . they end up with thousands of incomplete music files hence all the red squares that we are suddenly all too familar with. Why is the sync so slow now ? Waiting for items to copy teakes ages.

I solved the problem by removing all the music off my phone and replacing it in bite sized pieces that are still unacceptably slow but are managable.. But you have to wait until the sync has completely finished,

Thanks for your post Terry! I especial line the way you have addressed the "why", in addition to the "how". Good post!

I agree entirely: regardless of which method you use in remedying this problem, be prepared to spend several hours doing things which would usually take 10-15 minutes. I hope Apple will address this in the next update to iOS7.

I Had the same issue where about 70 songs out of 600 would play, whilst the others had a red circle with a red square in the middle. I had tried everything like restoring my 4s and restoring the preivous back up. Apple were unable to fix this issue. Im not quite sure what i did to fix this problem but here is what i did:

1) plug your device into itunes

2) click on the device and then click the 'music' tab

3) i unchecked 'entire music library' and then checked it again

4) press sync

5) i let is sync even though there were warnings that a certain song was not copied succesfully. It was only until the sync finished did i acknowledge the warning

i went back onto my phone and it was fixed :/

hopefully this helps

I have spent the last few hours reading forums, Googling, Itunes-ing, Apple-ing, etc. and finally found a solution to my similar problem. Only the music that I downloaded from my Iphone were playing, however they were showing in Music. These are the steps I took: I went to Store in Itunes and deauthorized my computer, then reauthorized my computer. I added home sharing on my Iphone, did another sync, also added all of my music to Icloud (although this didn't seem to work for me) and voila! I can play all of my music now. I am not sure which step was the trick but I don't care. At lease I didn't have to reset my phone. I would suggest a reboot as well. Hope this helps for someone!

Hi Everybody. I had the same problem with the red circles but only after I upgraded to IOS 7.02! I went out to jog and my phone was missing 90% of my music! It showed the music in the library but had red circles everywhere, i.e. the songs were gone! When I got home, I followed the recommendations of several of you in that I did the following:

• Start iTunes on your computer
• Connect your iPhone and let it synch
• Select your phone among the devices in iTunes
• Select the tab for Music
• Uncheck the "Synch Music" and then hit "Apply" (down at bottom of page). NOTE: this will remove all the music from your phone but it will not affect your iTunes library. Don't panic. It's necessary medicine.
• After the phone has synched and removed all the music, Go back to the same Music tab for your phone in iTunes and recheck "Synch Music". Then synch your phone again with iTunes. It will now reload all the music in your library back on to your phone.

The above fixed my problem. I hope it helps you.

Same problem here. Filed a complaint at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ and 1.800.MY.APPLE. Advanced tech support suggested wiping and reinstalling iOS. Lovely.

I can't tell you how many times I have done this - still did not work for me.