Completely wipe music from iPhone?

[balamw]

A while back I transistioned my wife and 14 year old son's iPhone's over to iOS 8 and family sharing instead of using my iTunes account as a common account between them. I had to change my password to a hard one to remember and they couldn't easily get Apps or other content when I was away, so this was to alleviate that.

My son's was easy, because I just set him up as a new iPhone and he had no music on his phone before the switch either. My wife's though has been a royal mess. I spent a large part of this weekend trying to fix it, but made it worse.

A large number of tracks are stuck in the dotted circle hell. My last attempt to try and sync it via USB resulted in the phone being completely full of "Other" to the extent that I had to restore it from backup.

During the restore she has a few tracks stuck in the iTunes store queue as Processing, but at least the "other" is gone. It has been restoring most of the day. I see her photos are all back.

At this point what I want to do is completely reset the Music app library on the iPhone.

Anyone have experience doing this? Can I do it from the iPhone? Would I have to create and manually edit the backup file on one of the Macs?

It sure would be nice if Apple allowed for selective restore from iCloud backup.

B

 

[david91]

never experienced it

 

[wacky4alanis]

You can delete all music from the phone by going to:

Settings->General->Usage->Manage Storage

Although I have seen cases where even this method will leave songs on the phone if your music database is corrupted. If that is the case, then a full restore as New iPhone is sometimes the best option.

I battled nasty music issues for months, did multiple restores, etc... and in the end, the only fix that actually worked was restoring it as a new phone. I've had no troubles since.

 

[balamw]

I did that, but the ghosts persisted. Even though I connected it via USB forced it to sync with my library and set it manually manage songs it insisted on doing a WiFi sync. I need to check on it tonight to see what's missing, but it gave me an error message about 78 tracks not syncing due to having content from over five Apple IDs.

Sigh, so unApple in complexity!

B

 

[wacky4alanis]

I thought that songs purchased from iTunes no longer have any DRM on them. As long as a song is in your library, it shouldn't matter who bought them. Do you have old songs from before 2009 when they still had DRM? If so, you may want to check out this article...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/01/18/itunes-drm/21964513/

There are ways to solve that issue.

 

[Shirasaki]

I did that, but the ghosts persisted. Even though I connected it via USB forced it to sync with my library and set it manually manage songs it insisted on doing a WiFi sync. I need to check on it tonight to see what's missing, but it gave me an error message about 78 tracks not syncing due to having content from over five Apple IDs.

Sigh, so unApple in complexity!

B

I have encountered similar issues many times when I update the firmware between iOS 8.3 and iOS 8.4 beta. What I have done successfully is using third party apps to delete the whole iTunes library from your phone (at least, iTunes preferences) and use iTunes to set up your new sync preferences. What you mentioned dotted circle issue is what I have seen before.

Hope this could help a little bit.

 

[balamw]

I have encountered similar issues many times when I update the firmware between iOS 8.3 and iOS 8.4 beta. What I have done successfully is using third party apps to delete the whole iTunes library from your phone (at least, iTunes preferences) and use iTunes to set up your new sync preferences. What you mentioned dotted circle issue is what I have seen before.

Hope this could help a little bit.

Which third party tools did you use?

B

 

[Shirasaki]

Which third party tools did you use?

B

I use iexplorer. The free version is enough to handle this task. You don't need to buy it.

Shirasaki

 

[balamw]

I use iexplorer. The free version is enough to handle this task. You don't need to buy it.

I was finally able to wipe the grey circled tracks off the iPhone with iexplorer and get a fresh start, but in the process all my wife's photos became "other" content as far as iTunes is concerned. On the phone itself they seem fine. I must have deleted something in the file system that lets iTunes see the photos as photos.

This weekend, I think I'm going the "set up as new iPhone" route. Sigh.

B

 

[Shirasaki]

I was finally able to wipe the grey circled tracks off the iPhone with iexplorer and get a fresh start, but in the process all my wife's photos became "other" content as far as iTunes is concerned. On the phone itself they seem fine. I must have deleted something in the file system that lets iTunes see the photos as photos.

This weekend, I think I'm going the "set up as new iPhone" route. Sigh.

B

For photos, you can find a folder called dc** what (I didn't remember, sorry) which stores all your photos and videos. Simply use the same utility to export everything from your phone. Then, add them back again.

Hope you don't really need to "set up as a new iPhone".