Q: Why are so many of my songs grayed out with a dotted circle?
Whenever I buy a song on iTunes and manually transfer it from my laptop to my iPhone, there's about a 50/50 chance it will actually work, and it's totally random when it moves over to the phone properly and when it doesn't even though I'm following identical steps both ways.
When it doesn't work, the song title is there on the phone, but it's grayed out and there's a dotted circle next to it, and it won't play. I call all the songs that died on the way to my phone ghost songs. I just bought a whole album and the whole album is ghost songs. The album I bought before that one, 10 out of 12 songs transferred right and the two remaining ones are ghost songs. There's no rhyme or reason to it.
I can play ghost songs on my phone at home on WiFi, but if I'm trying to play them off the phone's hard drive when I'm driving my long commute, they won't play. This is critically important because I'm on a family plan with limited data, and I don't want to stream.
I have tried repeatedly deleting the ghost songs off my phone and starting over, but the same thing happens every time I transfer. Once iTunes has decided to make a song a ghost, it seems to be a ghost for life.
What do I do?
iPhone 6, iOS 9.3.2
Posted on Jul 4, 2016 7:07 AM