What does a red circle with a red square inside it mean on a song listing?

Hi sjchr,

Welcome to the Support Communities!

The red square with a red circle around it is a symbol for a download in progress.

Songs that have a cloud symbol beside them have been purchased, but don't reside on your device.

When you click on the cloud icon, the song will be downloaded to the device, and you see a red square with a circle moving around. If you wanted to stop the download, you would tap on the red square.

Sometimes there may be an issue with the download, or the file may be corrupt.

If the song is not playing correctly, the first thing I would suggest is to restart / reset your device:

iOS: Turning off and on (restarting) and resetting

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1430

If the issue persists, you may need to redownload the song.

Downloading past purchases from the App Store, iBookstore, and iTunes Store

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519

Cheers,

Judy

Ever since I downloaded the last update, NONE of the cds I had downloaded into my iTunes library and synced onto my iphone will play anymore. They all have this icon next to them. I tried manually copying the files over to my iPhone in iTunes but that didn't work. I reset my settings on the phone, restarted it, synced it over and over again to no avail.

HELP!!

I have an iPhone 4s with iOS 7.0.4 on it currently.

Your music has not synched ... issue with IOS7.

Oh awesome!!! And no work around?! Argh frustrating.

If I didn't download the music in the first place but pulled it from a cd into iTunes, how would that work? There is NO WAY I'm going to put ALL my cds into iTunes again! I tried pulling some of my music from cds back into the phone manually but that didn't work. The next time you do a sync, all the music disappears again.

Did I mention that this really *****!?!?!

I just recently had this problem and I don't know if it will work for you but what I did was plug my iPhone up to my computer, start iTunes, go into my iPhone on iTunes, go into my music, select all my songs, right click, and select New Playlist From Selection. This created a Playlist 1 and it automatically retrieved the songs from my iTunes to create the playlist songs. I then deleted the playlist and now all my songs play fine. (If any still don't play after the first playlist, create a second one made up of the songs that didn't sync.) Hope this helped.

This worked beautifully!!! Thanks so much for sharing this workaround, Calm_Waters. Hopefully they'll fix this bug soon.

for the first time since iOS7 on my iPhone4s I have managed to Synch more that two tracks ... managed 1176 tracks and one video... #Joy. Did it by again setting synch to manual again (although this is my normal setting), and allowing iTunes to think I wanted to clear all music. tunes and video.

But before I got too excited the synch process:

1. Still missed out random tracks, that I can happily play in iTunes

2. Tried to synch again to fee up a little space and it did not neither remove nor add tracks

3. Again on random tracks it thought it would synch without the album artwork

Please Apple fix iOS7

The synch of my mini iPod from the same library & iTunes works every time.

Running iTunes on Win8.1

My take on it Solution: Click Me :3

But if your music was just ripped from CD, or purchased from someone other tha Apple so does not exist in iCloud, then this "solution" does not make sense. Apple have broken synch in iOS7 and need to fix it.

Judysings,

Could you please tell me where you found out about the circle/square symbol? On iTunes itself there is a dotted circle next to the same songs. I searched both iPod Touch and iTunes help to no avail.

I now understand from these threads that it has to do with an incomplete download, but it was such a struggle to get to this point.

Thank you.

Okay, so I'm having the same problem and it is very aggravating (big fat understatement, but yeah *insert colorful language here* aggravating.)

The whole 'creating a playlist with all your songs' doesn't even work for me as my iPhone now won't even sync playlists from my computer. I have only gotten this problem since the download of iOS 8.0.2, and I use a 5C iPhone.

Not only does this syncing problem affect files that were perfectly fine before, but it also messes up recently downloaded songs.

I've been trying to avoid this by finding music I've purchased in the 'purchased' section of the iTunes store, but this results in me only having a couple of songs I want, and this is what iPhones are supposed to be designed for, right? MUSIC.

So it would be awesome (understatement) if someone could fix this in future updates or I swear I'll go crazy.

I just spent three hours trying to fix some of my skipped songs but to no avail. I tried just syncing them, and some have been fixed, but it tends to mess up others and it's a terrible cycle of re-syncing up to 100 songs over and over.

Note: If it helps my computer runs on windows 8.

HALLELUJAH. I GOT IT. I had to revert all the songs and videos off of my iPhone and re-sync all of them back on, which was a pain, but was well worth it, because it works now, yay! (I also got some extra videos that wouldn't play before!)

Hey guys,

I had the same problem and it frustrated me so much!! I did something similar to Calm_Waters888. This is what I did:

1.) Open iTunes

2.) Plug iPhone into my computer

3.) Click on the my iPhone button (next to the iTunes store button)

4.) Erased all my songs off my iPhone

5.) Sync iPhone

Then I did this:

1.) Go back to the music section on my iPhone (on iTunes)

2.) Click on all the music I want on my iPhone

3.) Sync iPhone

This is what worked for me anyways. Good luck guys, hope this works!!!

Hi SJCHR

I realise the original post is older in origin but his problem is still ongoing for some of us, so I wanted to tell what I did. I got a new iPod Touch 5 in December 2014, and when syncing it with my iTunes playlists, I was getting the infamous red square with red circle. I tried several ways of syncing, I even wiped and re-synced my iPad and my iPod Touch 4 to see if the same thing happened to them but no they were fine. So the issue was just on the new iPod Touch 5 so I went to an apple store, they tested the unit and said all was ok, and couldn't understand why it didn't sync properly, they even implied I was "doing it wrong". I was determined to resolve it so sat in front of the pc and tried to sync my playlists one at a time with the iPod Touch 5, eureka, it worked. I continued like that for another 6 hours or so, one playlist at a time and now all my songs are on there. Basically to my way of thinking the red square and circle means the pc has sent the info to the iPod but the iPod hasn't finished processing. Having to sync one playlist at a time on the new iPod would indicate that Apple have used inferior slow processors of some sort in their alleged all singing all dancing iPod Touch 5, perhaps they should have used the same ones as they used in iPads and the iPod Touch 4 because work at blistering pace when syncing by comparison the to the new ones. If only I could go back and get one of those instead!

Hope this has helped, and good luck with your syncing.