How do I delete songs from iPad?

I have an iPad 3 and iTunes Match. iOS 5.1 I want to be able to delete songs from the iPad after they've been streamed there from Match.

I can delete them by swiping my finger left over a specific song. However, I have 20,000+ songs in my Match library. When just using the iPad, finding songs that have been stored (rather than still being only in the cloud) would take years. All 20k songs show on the iPad, even though only some are stored on the iPad itself. The others have the cloud download symbol. I can't find a way to only sort the locally stored. If anyone knows how to do that using the iPad alone it would be helpful. I can only see sorting by Album, Artist, Songs and Playlist.

I searched online but none of the suggestions worked. Here's what I tried:

In iTunes (on the computer) I set the Option to "Manually manage videos". I don't have an option showing for songs but when I uncheck the videos option it does mention music. I also have checked "Sync only checked songs and.." Am I missing something at this stage? I did click "Apply"

Then I click on the grey triangle of the left next to my iPad, under "Devices", in iTunes and select Music. I can see the songs that are stored locally. I highlight a song, right click, select "Delete" and nothing happens. I get the same non-result when I highlight a song and use the "Edit" function at the top and then select "Delete". Nothing happens. If I swipe and delete a song on the iPad it does disappear from the list on iTunes.

All the suggestions I found online seemed to think that this method should work. Any idea why it isn't working for me?

Edit: I spent 30 minutes with Apple support on the phone, with numerous breaks for the guy to check with a higher up tech, but no joy. His only suggestion was the manual swipe on the iPad itself, which is unacceptable. I would have to spend hours searching for songs individually and then swiping to delete them.

Night Spring said:

As I understand it, the method you are trying to use doesn't work if you have iTunes match turned on.

What I believe you should do is, go into Settings, Music. When you have iTunes Match on, there should be a setting that says "Show All Music." Turn this setting off. Now you should only see music that is downloaded to your iPad, which you can delete by swiping.

Click to expand...

It's a real kludge but this did work as a brute force solution. Thanks! The downside is when you turn off "show all music" then you can no longer stream from Match. So, I would have to turn on "show all music"...stream for a few hours...turn off "show all music" and then go back and manually swipe delete each song one by one. Yikes.

I really don't understand Apple's rationale. When I stream from Match to my Macbook Air, no songs are stored on it. Why does Apple set it so that Match streaming doesn't store on devices with large hard drives but does store streamed songs on devices with minimal storage space? (My MBA has iTunes installed but it doesn't contain my iTunes library, that's on a different computer)

I'm going to keep trying to find a way to do mass deletes, using iTunes on the computer, with the iPad connected via USB.

Zcott said:

Not sure if I'm reading this thread right, but assuming you want to delete all songs stored locally, go to Settings > General > Usage > then you can swipe on Music to delete all music stored locally.

Click to expand...

I don't show that option.

Settings-General-Usage gets me to Storage, iCloud, Battery Usage and Cellular Usage. Storage is a list of apps that can store data but I don't see the Music app listed. The other options don't relate to music stored on the iPad.

However, I can now actually do what I wanted to do from the start. I don't know which one of the numerous tweaks I tried got it going but the important thing is it now works.

In iTunes on the computer, I click on my iPad 3 under "Devices" and then "Music". That then just shows the songs that have been streamed/downloaded to the iPad. I can highlight the entire group and delete with one click.

Thanks for the help!

I did click "show all apps". I just did it again and discovered the Music app is buried deep in the list of my 185 apps. However, it doesn't show any locally stored songs. The only option I see is "Edit" and that just allows me to delete the app. It does tell me how many MB of songs I have.