my itunes will sync music but wont download it to my phone

Question

my itunes will sync music but wont download it to my phone

specifically, it won't download one certain album that I downloaded off of bandcamp. I downloaded the music, extracted the files, and downloaded them to itunes, but when I tried to put them on my phone, I noticed that the songs weren't going into my phone's library. From the perspective of my phone, the songs didn't exist.

so I played around a little more, backed up my phone, synced my music library, dragged the album to my phone about a hundred more times before I scrolled through my phone's library on my computer.

What had happened, is the songs were all in that "preparing to download" stage, where there's the little dotted-line circles next to each of the songs, but they were not downloading. I cannot delete the songs or stop the downloads, and unplugging my phone from the computer does nothing. I even restored my phone, but the songs are still there. they look like this:

Mind you, this isn't the first album off of a third party site that I have downloaded and put onto my phone (the first, i believe, was off of the artist's website, and this one and the one before were both from bandcamp), but this is the only one giving me problems like this.

I also tried syncing only this album, but it deleted all of my other music and my phone would not let me download them. I had to re-sync the whole phone to get my other songs back, but I'm very frustrated that I "broke" this album.

I'm not sure how to fix it and I'm open to any suggestions.

I run iTunes on Windows 10, and my phone is an iPhone 7plus. both are completely up to date.

iPhone 7 Plus, iOS 10.2.1

Posted on Mar 5, 2017 11:04 AM

Reply

Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

278,263 points

Mar 5, 2017 11:15 AM in response to spreadiblebutter

Try changing your sync options so these tracks would no longer be included, sync, then try again. If they greyed out entries remain you may be able to switch to manual management to remove them, then go back to syncing.

It seems somewhat overkill for a single album, but if nothing else works 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.

Backup device.
Restore as a new device.
Restore the backup you made earlier.

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.

tt2

Reply