iTunes refuses to believe I have no music on my phone

[eea76]

I have been fighting this horrendous nonsense for months and I need to solve it. iTunes insists that I have a ton of music on my phone.

But my phone it says "no content" as expected.
These are only albums that I've purchased through the Store; they just will not go away.

I have tried everything. When I delete them they simple return after I sync again.

- Show All Music is Off
- Hiding/Unhiding albums in iTunes > View Account seems to make no difference whatsoever.
- Manually Manage Music and Videos is checked
- Sync Music is unchecked

Why are these grayed out songs refusing to go away? My iPad doesn't have this problem at all! Please see attachments; I cannot get these to go away! Some are grayed out, some are not, but every album is listed twice for no reason.

Edit: looks like those attachments are broken for some reason. Here is an imgur link: http://imgur.com/a/cjvG4

 

[eea76]

EXCITING update to this amazing crap: even though my phone said there was no music on it, I was still able to play the purchased music through iTunes. So I moved all of the albums that resided on my local harddrive to an external to make sure those copies weren't the ones actually playing, and the music was definitely still coming through the phone.

So I got iExplorer which lets me more or less browse parts of the filesystem, and I discovered a "Purchases" folder in there filled with cryptically named .m4a and .m4p files, taking up insane amounts of space (which would probably explain why my "Other" space amount was so high). So it seems that albums you purchase reside on your phone no matter what you do, at least in my case.

I'm going through and deleting all these files through iExplorer and once that's done we'll see what happens. This deceptive garbage makes me despise this whole Apple ecosystem.

 

[eea76]

I am happy to report this awful crap is solved. Deleting the thousands of secret lingering files in "Purchases" did indeed resolve the issue and also freed up the majority of the "other" usage that iTunes was reporting.

Bottom line here is without a 3rd-party application that let me delete files and folders directly, I never would have discovered that every album I had ever purchased was still clogging my device and thoroughly inaccessible.

Of course I will never be purchasing from the iTunes Store again, and all the albums I bought will be trashed and replaced by CD rips. My favorite part of this unnecessary fustercluck is that it's entirely the result of Apple's design. Great job guys.

 

[macman5]

I had this same exact issue and thanks to you was able to fix it and sync my music once again!

Thanks

 

[eea76]

Cool, I'm glad you were able to solve it. It's been about a month and this problem has not returned for me, so as long as I never buy music from the iTunes Store again I don't foresee it coming back.

 

[T5BRICK]

Cool, I'm glad you were able to solve it. It's been about a month and this problem has not returned for me, so as long as I never buy music from the iTunes Store again I don't foresee it coming back.

I had something similar happen when I was using iTunes match. In the end, I restored my device for other reasons and I've completely stopped using the built in Music app, iTunes and the iTunes store. I exclusively use Google Play Music now.