Songs won't sync from iTunes to my 4S?

In iTunes when you select the 4S, go to the Music tab - is "Entire music library" selected? If so, go to Music (in your iTunes library), click on the check mark next to the "Name" column header (to sort by checked music) and scroll to the bottom. Any unchecked music won't sync.

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You may want to double check if the songs on your itunes library have same folder location as before. Sometimes itunes does not indicate which songs it cannot find until you select them. Songs in your library that itunes can't locate, won't be synced to your iphone.
Just check that all the songs play correctly.

I recently got a refurb replacement 32GB 3GS via applecare and have got the same problem when added music manually - I think it's an iOS5 thing.

I can see on the iphone's music list that some items are greyed out and have a circular 'sync' symbol next to them. deleting this off the iphone and then adding the track again seems to solve it, but when trying to put 15GB of music back it's very annoying!

thomamon said:

After more discovering I have definitely confirmed this is some sort of a bug.

Today I discovered if I actually do a search from the search screen the song comes up. So apparently it is on the phone, just not coming up in Music.

Who do you report a bug like this to?

Click to expand...

Apple support forums.

Fixed it very easily.

I had this very same problem and diagnosed it as a glitch with iTunes. You're not doing anything wrong. After much trial and error I have resolved an extremely simple and non file-altering fix. What I did firstly is instead of selecting "Entire Music Library", under sync music on your device's tab on iTunes I chose "Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres". I then went in and selected all of my music by hand (yes, your hand will be sore after this, but you need to do this). I then realized that when I sync everything but the playlists my music library syncs fine. That means iTunes has a problem with playlists. I then noticed that for each album I was having trouble with there was a playlist with that title! To sum it up, If you sync up a playlist with the same title as an album it will confuse iTunes. Unfortunately, this means you may only be able to use playlists that are built into iTunes (the ones with the gear icons). select only those under the genre section along with everything in all other sections and your device should be complete.

TO SUM IT UP IF YOU DON'T WANT TO MARVEL AT MY CLEVERNESS:

1. Select "Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres" instead of "Entire Music Library" on your device's music tab in iTunes.
2. Select Every artist, album, genre, and playlist except the playlists not marked with a gear.
3. Press apply and your device should have all of it's music.

Hope I helped!

I am having the same problem as the first person, i've tried all of your solutions and suggestions and so far no luck. i'm missing just over 250 songs and they just aren't showing up on my iphone. I have the 4S, and everything is up to date, i really don't understand what the problem could be. please help?

There's another way

Sorry to hear you're still having problems with this. It is stressful, I know. Try this. After you manually select all of your albums and artist don't select any playlists or genres. See if that works. If it doesn't there is one last method that will almost definitely work but is a little annoying. If you select an album that isn't working and click get info you can change the name of it. Change the name of the artist in a subtle way; I added a period to the end of an artist. This will trick iTunes into thinking it's a different album and it will hopefully sync.
Hope I helped, and good luck!

Here the fix

I had the same problem and here is how I fixed it.

1. Make a list of the song(s) that won't sync. Right click and choose "Get Info" or press Cmd + i on any song


2. Be sure the Summary tab is selected and toward the bottom; right click on "Where" and choose "Show in Finder" - In Finder select all the songs that won't sync

3. Create a folder on your desktop, drag and drop those songs that will not sync to this folder. TIP Opening another Finder window makes this easier.

EDIT: you may want to try just 1 song to see if it will work for you

4. Back in iTunes delete the songs that won't sync **WARNING** BE SURE YOU HAVE A COPY OF THAT SONG IN YOUR DESKTOP FOLDER BEFORE YOU DELETE!

5. Now select all the songs from your desktop folder and drag and drop onto your iTunes icon on your dock to reimport those songs.

6. Re-sync your device

This worked for me, I hope it helps you!

retep1515 said:

I had this very same problem and diagnosed it as a glitch with iTunes. You're not doing anything wrong. After much trial and error I have resolved an extremely simple and non file-altering fix. What I did firstly is instead of selecting "Entire Music Library", under sync music on your device's tab on iTunes I chose "Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres". I then went in and selected all of my music by hand (yes, your hand will be sore after this, but you need to do this). I then realized that when I sync everything but the playlists my music library syncs fine. That means iTunes has a problem with playlists. I then noticed that for each album I was having trouble with there was a playlist with that title! To sum it up, If you sync up a playlist with the same title as an album it will confuse iTunes. Unfortunately, this means you may only be able to use playlists that are built into iTunes (the ones with the gear icons). select only those under the genre section along with everything in all other sections and your device should be complete.

TO SUM IT UP IF YOU DON'T WANT TO MARVEL AT MY CLEVERNESS:

1. Select "Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres" instead of "Entire Music Library" on your device's music tab in iTunes.
2. Select Every artist, album, genre, and playlist except the playlists not marked with a gear.
3. Press apply and your device should have all of it's music.

Hope I helped!

Click to expand...

Genius

I know this is an old thread but was having same problem with the latest iTunes and iPhone 5.

I just deleted the corresponding playlist and boom.
Thanks

EASY FIX!! >> "Album Artist" on iTunes

Just came upon this same problem with my new iPhone 4S and although this is an old thread, thought I'd share my simple solution...

Since I saw that the songs were in fact on the iPhone and just not showing up under the Artist > Album (even though the names all matched in descriptions!), I did some hunting on iTunes... looking into the info for each song--I tried changing the Artist, the Sort by fields, the grouping artist, etc. Nothing worked... I still had only 1 song (from an EP of 4) showing up under the album on my phone. Then I looked at that song alone to see what was different from the other 3, and I saw that it had an "Album Artist" listed, whereas the tracks NOT showing up didn't have one listed.

All I had to do was select all all the tracks, change the Album Artist to match for them, re-sync, and everything was working just as it should Playlists are a great option too but it's a little too hard to manage when your music turns over a lot.

Hope this helps!

-AK

Songs not appearing on iPhone

I had the same problem. From another post, I discovered that the song was on the iPhone when I performed a search, but it did not appear under the artist section of the Music app. Long story short, I figured out if I deselect the "Part of a Compilation" checkbox for all my songs, then I could then see them on my iPhone. Hope this helps. It drove me crazy. The songs are actually on your phone, but you cant see them until you perform this step.

another fix for iTunes and iphone not syncing

I recently lost access to approx. 4500 songs after trying to establish Wi-Fi sync (which kept freezing my laptop) with 'unscucessful sync' the result . All 4700+ songs appeared in the 'Device' part of iTunes but only 167 actually appeared on the iPhone and no playlists would sync. I tried some of the fixes in this thread, even manually ticked every artist, albumn, genre, with and without playlists. I did not try some of the fiddlier fixes (e.g. Finder) because of the large number. Anyway, nothing worked so I deleted all music data from iPhone and the phantom list still appeared in iTunes-device, before and after syncing. So I restored a backup version of iTunes from a couple of weeks ago and then restored the backup version of the iPhone (no music data) then during the followup sync the music transferred correctly and everything seems to back to normal .