SOLUTION: Some Music Won't Play After Upgrading Your iPhone To iOS7

I tried following this procedure http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451 by dragging iTunes Music Library.xml to my desktop, deleting iTunes Library.itl, opening iTunes & doing a File>Import>Playlist to grab the iTunes Music Library.xml from my desktop, & then trying to sync. I was hopeful that would work since other people in this chain had good luck with that, but my iPhone 5 still won't sync properly (it looks like it's trying to sync but nothing actually happens), & I still have red circles/squares next to most of the songs on my phone. Did I miss a step somewhere? I've tried unchecking & rechecking the Sync Music/Entire Music Library boxes in iTunes, but neither of those make any difference whatsoever when I try to sync my phone. When you said you had to uncheck your music & then checking it all again after copying it to a folder, do you mean unchecking/checking the box next to each individual song? I sure hope not, because I have over 8000 songs in my library.

Mitch's solution worked on my ipad4. Thanks Mitch!

Hi Mitch,

Your fix works, only temporarily, for me. I have had to do this same procedure several times, when any change is made within iTunes. I used to be able to add 1 artist or 1 song to a playlist, re-sync and then it'd be on my phone.

Now, I get some notification about "Do you want these changes to be applied to your iPhone" and if I select "Yes" then the Music gets all messed up, mostly CD music that used to work with no problems, showing the red square with circles and won't play on my iphone. I have to unselect "Music" and remove all the music from my phone, then reselect it and it fixes it.

I am VERY TIRED of repeating this process, EVERYTIME I make a small change or a big one for that matter.

Apple - is this problem caused by iTunes or IOS7??

Thanks,

Elaine

Elaine,

Did you try the solution I posted? I have an iPad, but it's worth a try.

Plug your device in, open iTunes and let it backup your device. Create a folder on your desktop (or anywhere you want) select all the music, either copy and paste your music into that folder or cut and paste, but either way, after your music is copied, delete it from iTunes. Sync. Then select all the music in that folder that you just copied, and add it back to your playlist by selecting all, drag and drop it back onto your playlist and let it copy back in.

Sync after all the music copies back in. That's what I did to fix this particular problem I had on my iPad.

I hope it works for you.

Good luck!

After a lot of time spent on the phone with Apple support, my phone is finally fixed. In order to get music to sync to my phone again we had to do a backup & then a total restore in recovery mode to set up the phone from scratch. After that I was able to sync again, but only some of my music would sync at first. I had to uncheck the sync music option, sync again to remove the music from my phone, then recheck the sync music option & sync again. That time it worked & put my entire music library back onto my phone with no red circles! After that was done I restored my phone to the backup I had done earlier to restore my contacts, apps, etc. Everything is working again!

Did you try the solutions we posted? You didn't have to restore your whole phone, just the music.

I did try each of those solutions before resorting to doing a restore, but my problem seemed to be somewhat unique in the sense that my phone just would not sync. It was the restore that finally allowed it to sync again. Prior to that it would look like it was trying to sync but nothing would ever happen.

Hi rdkendrick,

Thanks for the info. I tried your approach but am not sure what went wrong:

1) I did the select all in iTunes, copied and pasted into new folder on my desktop

2) I deleted everything in iTunes, synced

3) Copied "everything" from the folder back into iTunes, using "Select All" as you instructed

But, I am now working on restoring my iTunes music library which is 2200+ songs prior to this and afterwards only had less than 500.

Not sure if the problem is related to how many I tried to select and copy on the first step, or what.

Thanks for trying. This problem seems pretty weird...

Fortunately, I have an iTouch with most of the music that wasn't in iTunes or Amazon cloud and had to buy a software for restoring from that earlier since my laptop and external hard drive were stolen earlier this year.

I am STILL very dissappointed in Apple since I was NOT having this problem before iTunes 11 and IOS7 were introduced.

I'll let you know how it works, after I get everything restored and start syncing, making minor changes, etc.

Thanks,

Elaine

I'm VERY disappointed in Apple, too. They caused this problem and I don't see them doing anything about it. Maybe they are working on a fix, but at least let us know. I had no problem before iOS 7.0.3. Everything worked great, but as soon as I upgraded to 7.0.3 and synced, it went kablooey.

I'm sorry my fix didn't work for you. Maybe because I have an iPad, don't know.

This caused me all sorts of problems. I had to rebuild my C: drive on my main PC after messing with trying to get the music working right. Luckily, I also use a laptop, so I was able to do everything from there. Took me a week and late nights to get my PC restored.

I use Acronis True Image and always try to keep a recent drive image available so I don't have to do much, but unfortunately, I procrastinated on that PC and only had an older image.

Good luck with rebuilding your music library!

After trying various solutions for this (iPhone 5 +MBPro) I unchecked music, synced, then re-checked music and synced and it seems to be working now....

I know your talking about iPhones here, BUT, had the same issue (RED square in a RED circle) with an iPod 5. Attempted the fix listed above and a couple of others listed else where... "NO JOY". What did work was to connect to my computer, make a back up of all my stuff, apps, music, pictures, etc. Then went into restore to factory settings from computer. When asked to backup from iPod or new iPod... Treat it as if it was a new out of the box iPod and click new iPod. run through all the new set ups, when it's all finished go to your back copies, libraries, etc. and down load your music, pictures, apps, etc. It's a pain but it worked, no more RED circles and music is working fine. Hope this helps, Good Luck.

Hello all

I tried the info on the orginal post and it doesn't work. I have a iphone 4 version 7.0.3. I can't afford another phone as I bought it new and simless so was very expensive. What can I do to get rid of the red dots with the red squares (its like the square measles for iphones)...I really only want to play this one cd (I burned it from my cd collection - its a work thing) and it's not available in the store so I couldn't buy if I wanted to ....

Is it a bug ? How can I fix it

Thanks in advance for any help..

Vinesy

I'm an iPod 5 user, but had the same red square in a red circle. Tried the sync / un-sync, resets, etc. Would not clear / get the red out. I ended up copying everything to my computer and restored the iPod to factory settings, then reset as a new out of the box iPod, DO NOT USE your iPod back up / finish restore. Then put back all my stuff from the computer. It worked, it wasn't pretty but it worked. Have you been able to copy cd's you burned in the past? I haven't tried that, I do know that burned cd's TOC maybe missing info that can prevent you from using it in your iTunes or phones' library, that could be your problem, but like I said I never tried it either. Good Luck.

Vinesy,

Do you have a computer that you can back up your iPhone to? If so, you won't lose your music, plus you can copy it elsewhere, on the computer, just in case. In fact, if that is music that you are not able to buy, I'd be making a CD of it and putting it in storage somewhere.

Did you try the back-up and restore? That, ultimately, is what fixes everyone else's problem.

I have an iPad. I hooked it up to iTunes, on my laptop, let it back up. I went to my desktop, right-clicked and chose new-folder, and named it Music. In iTunes, I clicked on the playlist, on the left (Library view) and selected all my music, by right-clicking and choosing select all. Then, I right-clicked and chose copy, went to my music folder, right-clicked and selected paste and let all my music copy into that folder. (Now I have a copy of all my music, even though it's just 842 files)

I went back to my playlist, all the music was still selected, so I right-clicked and chose delete. This removed all my music from the playlist. I synced, to let my iPad see the change. Then I went to the Music folder, right-clicked, chose select all, and, using the mouse, I dragged all my music and dropped it on my playlist tab, which copies all the music back into the playlist. This, essentially, rebuilds your playlist, which is what restore is doing, but you don't have to mess with your other data.

After the music copied back into the playlist, I synced, and the "red circles with squares" went away. I have a combination of ripped and purchased music, so there were a few files I had to download from iTunes/purchased, but all my music is back and playable, and I have an extra copy on my desktop, in a folder named Music. I have my iTunes set to copy my music to C:\ users\%username%\documents\music\itunes\music anyway, so I really always have a copy of my music. Whether you use my method, or do a backup\restore, either one should fix the problem, so good luck.

If nothing else, you could call Apple like some people did.

Take care.

Thanks everyone - I evenually did web chat with apple staff (3 hours!!!) Still they were very patient and polite. I had to restore the phone as new and erase everything with my photos, contacts and music backed up to the cloud.

Looks like this is the only thing you can do. Actually its not too bad you just lose your text messages and call logs and things like alarm settings but they are not too bad to reset!

I would reccommend the web chat it is great and free.

It's in get support on the apple website

All the best

Vinsey