Why is some of the music on iTunes not available to me? These are indicated by a dotted circle that provides no explanation. The music appears to be music that I have purchased from other sources, but then, a lot of music that I have purchased from outside iTunes do appear. These tracks with the dotted circle also do not sync to my iPhone 7.
Why, why, why does Apple mess around with our private stuff like this. Unacceptable.
iPhone 7, iOS 10.2.1
turingtest2 wrote:
It is possible that using Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage > Music > Edit > All Songs > Delete on the device and then resyncing will produce the same results...
I've just tried this as I discovered a bunch of my content was showing with the dreaded dotted grey circles. No dice. Around 80 tracks resolutely refused to be deleted from device when viewed via iTunes > Device > Music, even though none showed on the device itself. Nor could I find any way to clean those tracks short of a full restore as a new device. I even tried manually deleting the recognizable video files in iPod_Control with the assistance of iFunBox, and rebooting the device, but the zombie entries refused to disappear. Rebuild has taken around 3 hours, but at least everything plays again.
tt2
The greyed out tracks and dotted circle icons would seem to indicate that iTunes has stalled during a transfer and now isn't properly accounting for what is and is not already on the device. Sadly it doesn't recover gracefully from this issue.
You could try the following all-purpose steps for dealing with erratic device or sync behaviour. They assume that all of the content you want on the device is in your library ready for restoring. If it isn't see Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device first. I would also recommend you copy everything out of the camera roll if you haven't already.
Use an encrypted backup if you want to preserve passwords, Wi-Fi settings, web history and health data where appropriate. I also suggest syncing with a selection of playlists (unless you're using iCloud Music Library) rather than manually adding content as, if nothing else, the process above is easier to do if you ever have to go through it again.
It is possible that using Settings > General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage > Music > Edit > All Songs > Delete on the device and then resyncing will produce the same results, though it may depend on exactly why things have gone wrong in the first place, and it might not help with Tones anyway
tt2
Dotted circle next to music tracks on iTunes
