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

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!

I am no expert, but after experiencing the "red circle" drama on itunes, I just deleted my iphone play lists, then reinstalled them, voila! All work- no red circles. In fact the shuffle feature was getting stagnant and now it is much better.

Message was edited by: pwrcatgma

I had the same problem when only about 5% of my 11,000 song collection on my Ipad would play after downloading OS 7.0. I re synced my Ipad with ITunes on my MacBook selecting no music and all of the music was erased from the Ipad. I then re-synched it selecting all music, all songs re-loaded, and all songs play just fine.

I had the same problem. I tried what was suggested...nothing.

So i did the following. I hope it will help you.

-Plug your iPhone to your mac with the cable.

-In iTune select your iPhone, then select music.

-Tap synchronize (lower right).

-Then look carefully at the status bar at the top of the window.

-You will se the progression of the bar stop a long time over one song of your iTune library and then the synchronization will stop suddenly. Take note of that song.

-When the sync is finished. Go to the iTune library.

-Delete the song.

-Back to Music.

-Press sync again.

It worked for me . I haven’t try to put the song back in the library...to much time wasted over those red circle/square !!!

Good luck.

The only way I was able to get rid of the cricles and actually sync all my music was to check the box for "Convert to {bitrate} AAC"

I didnt want to compress my music but this was the only way for me to get them to sync with my phone

Followed advice from several other posts for my 4S:

1. Back Up iPhone.

2. Restore original settings.

3. Restore backup.

Red cirles with red squares gone; all music now plays with no issues. Wondering to myself why I didn't do this several weeks ago....

i just read through all of this, because all of my music was messing up(Mostly all of my def leppard and ACDC), and all i did was i clicked some of the squares which didnt seem to work, then ran all the songs in my itunes on my laptop to make sure it was just the phone, and THEN(since you said the square means downloading) I synced it into my itunes and i guess itunes completed the downloads for them and now everything works fine!

So in Recap:

1. Sync your phone.

2. Enjoy