Dashed circle in my itunes

so far no luck with this, signed out on both iTunes & iPhone 7, still have the circles.

did try removing the offending songs from the playlist and syncing, adding back and syncing, no joy.

the circles only show up on the phone, not iTunes. I logged out in iTunes, and logged out of my Apple account on phone.

I'll try playing the songs on the phone, maybe this is a non-issue, but it's odd that it won't go away.

Not real interested in erasing my entire phone and restoring.

Dashed Circles (Downloads Waiting) Fix for iPhone

The dashed circles next to your songs ‘shown on this phone’ in iTunes or downloads on the phone that are waiting but never start, are symptomatic of a corrupt database somewhere on the phone itself.

The way to resolve the problem is to erase all content from the phone and restore it from your last backup using iTunes. Don’t panic - the restore feature includes all of your App data and settings.

The procedure as follows:

1. Connect phone to iTunes using USB cable for speed.

2. Deselect ‘Sync Music’ to remove all music.

3. Press ‘Sync’ to initiate a backup.

4. Go to the phone and select General>Reset>Erase all content and settings.

5. When the phone restarts, follow the prompts and restore from your last backup.

6. Unlock your phone.

7. Reselect ‘Sync Music’ in iTunes and then re-sync.

Hopefully, all good.

Squid

I went through all the steps and its still happening to me. Any other suggestions?

The backup proces carried out with no music selected in iTunes should have worked its way around the corrupt database file.

Confirm that you are managing your music library using one iTunes account?

And, the dashed circles are only on your iPhone and not anywhere in your iTunes library?

I am only managing with one account and the dotted circles only show up under my iPhones music. Everything plays fine under my iTunes music library with no issues or dotted circles

THANK YOU! SOLVED THE PROBLEM AND DID THE TRICK!....On cleaning up the grey dotted circles, my ITunes Db library, mixed up album covers, and song titles.

I signed out my apple store account on both itunes and my IOS device and then syncd - resolved.

I did an iPad restore but didn't recover from my back up. Lo and behold it fixed the problem and now I also have an extra 12 gigs that was stored under "other". Hmmmm.

I have to reset my phone to factory everytime I buy new music so that it will download to my phone. Is there a problem with my phone?

The dashed circles also indicate an incomplete download

I have encountered two other causes for dashed circles to appear and both without any form of error messages appearing in iTunes. The dashed circles would appear randomly but only with new music. A re-sync would fix some but then not others.

Check your USB cable for damage. If you suspect you have overstressed your cable then try to remove all of the bends and do not move the phone or laptop during the re-sync process. Do not permit the phone to dangle under its own weight when hooked up as this also can interfere with the transfer.

Remove all other USB devices. If you have too much traffic on the interface the phone will stop and drop the current track then move on to the next one. A device like the Elgato EyeTV is known to interferfere with the transfer because it consumes a large amount of bandwidth.

Neither of the above faults will be obvious in iTunes but you will see odd messages in your System Logs during the re-sync.

I was getting a dotted circle next to movies and tv shows and iTunes simply would not sync them. For both Movies and TV Shows, I have my iPad set to sync a single playlist each. Turns out for me it wasn't working because the Smart Playlist I was syncing was within a playlist folder. I simply moved the playlist to the top level, instead of being in a folder, and it immediately synced everything that was missing on the next attempt.

zofinger wrote:

I signed out my apple store account on both itunes and my IOS device and then syncd - resolved.

Thanks! I found that I only needed to sign out of my account in iTunes and sign back in. It is happily syncing now.

Signing out on both my iphone 5s and itunes on my pc, then signing back into both before syncing worked perfectly.

Thanks zofinger!

I got this dotted circle when I manually stopped while it was in the middle of syncing music from my iTunes to my iPhone. The way I fixed it is by going on my iPhone from my computer. In the Summary section there should be a long horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen indicating how much memory you have used. Beside this bar is a button that says Sync. Click this and wait a few minutes while iTunes works and when it is done everything should be back to normal. Hopefully this works, good luck!

Squidhead's process is the only thing that worked for me and my iPhone 5S running iOS 7.1. I wasted quite a bit of time researching this before I found his/her post, too. So thanks, Squid! You made me a happy guy.