Mp3s won't play on iPhone

Question

Level 1

4 points

Mp3s won't play on iPhone

Unable to do what we've been doing for, oh, you know, 20 years with iPods. Put music into your iTunes and then sync it onto iphone to listen on-the-go. Today, made a short playlist of my own tracks (do not exist on Apple Music, etc) and then synced to my phone. Only 3 out of 10 will play. The rest are grayed out and it says "This track is not available in your country or region" which makes no sense at all considering they are unique mp3 files directly from my computer.

Why is apple consistently making things worse? With each update, there are more glitches than before.

iPhone 8, iOS 16

Posted on Nov 1, 2025 12:39 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Servant of Cats

Level 7

32,783 points

Nov 1, 2025 1:52 PM in response to iamCarey

Did you have an Apple Music subscription where you were using "Sync Library" – and subsequently get rid of it?

If so, perhaps you could try this:

Connect your iPhone to your Mac, clear all music selections, and do a manual synchronization to the iPhone. This should remove ALL music from the iPhone, including, maybe, stale DRMed "offline listening" and "Sync Library" tracks that could be fooling the Mac into thinking that the desired songs are already on the phone.
Now select the music you want to put on the iPhone, and do another manual synchronization.

Reply