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I have iPhone 8 iOS 12.0 and iTunes 12.9. All my music on the iPhone plays as it should and syncing has been smooth but when I look at it under "Device" in iTunes, hundreds of songs have the grey dotted circle. Some of these songs have been ripped from CD's and some have been downloaded (years ago and recently). There are no duplicates. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the songs afflicted. Since everything is working as far as syncs and playing music goes, I have been loathe to do anything about it. What's bugging me is that I noticed the "On My Device/Purchased Folder" list of songs with the grey dotted circle increased between two syncs this afternoon (there are many more songs with the issue than are in the Purchased Folder). I assume there must be something screwy with the iPhone database. Any thoughts as to what might be going on?

iPhone 8, iOS 12, iTunes 12.9

Posted on Sep 21, 2018 3:48 PM

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Posted on Sep 22, 2018 8:08 AM

If your library has more content than will fit on your device you might want to sync a subset of the library. There are options on the Music tab for the device that let you chose what it synced. See step 5 and the image below. Instead of Entire Library you can choose Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres. This is in contrast to Manually manage content on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes - Apple Support which is the other way to manage content, and would requires additional effort to recreate after a restore.


tt2

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 22, 2018 8:08 AM in response to john in wyoming

If your library has more content than will fit on your device you might want to sync a subset of the library. There are options on the Music tab for the device that let you chose what it synced. See step 5 and the image below. Instead of Entire Library you can choose Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres. This is in contrast to Manually manage content on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using iTunes - Apple Support which is the other way to manage content, and would requires additional effort to recreate after a restore.


tt2

Sep 21, 2018 4:42 PM in response to john in wyoming

You could try the following all-purpose steps for dealing with erratic device or sync behaviour (including the troublesome grey dotted circles of stalled transfers). 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.


  1. Backup device.
  2. Restore as a new device.
  3. 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.


(*) The downside with backup encryption is that if you forget the password when you need it again, which could be years later, you may need to invoke a workaround to turn off encryption as shown in Re: disable encrypted backups, which can only help if your device is in a state that can backup to iCloud, or runs iOS 11.



FWIW I successfully used this method some time ago when Siri became unable to call contacts or play my music.



tt2

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