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

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.

YAY, I did it!!! Ok what I did was I synced the phone like normal and of course the dreaded red circles were still there. So I went to iTunes and unsynced all my music, synced once again...all music was removed from my phone, Then when that was over I checked sync music and then the songs started coping YAY now my entire playlist has returned with NO red CIRCLES!

HELPED THANKS! 🙂

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

That worked for me. Thank you. Just unclick all your playlists and everything else. Then apply. choose your playlists again and apply again.

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 think I've figured out the problem. I was having the same issues and here's what I did:

• Uncheck all songs from the selected playlist
• Sync iPhone
• Once sync is finished, re-check all of the songs
• Sync iPhone

If done properly, you should see a lot of the songs under your device with a dashed looking circle. It will take a few minutes, but the sync will be on the last step before any of the songs load. After that the songs will lose the dashed circle and they will re-appear normally without the red circle with the square. Hope this helps.

-Alex

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

This problem keeps reappearing for me, despite the (temporary) fixes. iTunes 11.1.2, iOS 7.0.3.

yep thats what i did i am going to uncheck sync over wifi in case its recurrent

• Start iTunes on your computer
• Connect your iPhone and let it sync
• Select your phone among the devices in iTunes
• Select the tab for Music
• Uncheck the "Sync 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 synced and removed all the music, Go back to the same Music tab for your phone in iTunes and re-check "Synch Music". Then sync your phone again with iTunes. It will now reload all the music in your library back on to your phone.

This FINALLY worked for me. I have been following a couple of threads on this topic and I had tried most of the solutions I'd found in the last week or so. None of them worked--INCLUDING this one. I had tried this more than once, in fact. But for some reason I did it again today and finally my Playlists got in sync on my iPhone 4. Not sure if it will keep syncing once I add new music in future, but for now it has worked. 🙂

This from sgibbs33 worked for me. I would have spent the rest of my life trying to figure it out.

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! 🙂