A lot of songs grayed out

Okay I got it figured out well sorta… this is with a bunch of assumptions that I don’t know how Apple did everything. But iTunes helped a bunch.

If you pull up iTunes and look at your songs list. Add the “iCloud Status” column. This will display how your music is held at Apple.

I was always under the assumption that when I moved it to Apple Music when it came out in 2015 or whenever I moved it, it tracked that it was my music. It didn’t. So at some point in the iOS16 upgrade. All those original files where you could play the song from broke, because it was playing an Apple Music song not your song.

So the easiest fix is to take that music that is hopefully still on your computer move it back to iTunes. It will create a temporary duplicate record, but that duplicate record once you click sync to iCloud, will merge with the Grey record and overwrite it. If it can find a song it’ll say matched. If it can’t it’ll say uploaded and you’ll now have songs that dropped off your music that you didn’t know about either.

So the ones that say matched here are ones that said “Apple Music” previously but I moved my file in from my computer and it overrode the file there and now it’s synced correctly again.

Unfortunately it looks like that nukes the playlist record. No idea why it overrides it in one but deletes it in the other.

I have a very same problem

@Grandbot21 - I've checked the same as you and found out that:

• "no longer available" - some of them white, some of them greyed out - so I'm gonna delete all of them
• "Matched" - all white and playable (I guess, there are too many of them to try)
• "Purchased" - all white and most likely playable
• "Uploaded" - all white and most likely playable
• "Apple Music" - I guess about 30% greyed out - not playable. Even from one album - some songs ok, some don't
• "Waiting" - 7 songs, all greyed out - not playable

Here is an example:

So I can't use your solution since I don't have copies of them. I would have to delete/re-add them. Since my library contains thousands of songs, it is impossible.

It's kind of useless now. I have many playlists, which are broken now...

I hope somebody will find a solution.

I have a call with Apple support tomorrow it was escalated and they have logs from my iPad.

Can you do something for me, since I’ll have another example tomorrow. Can you add the date modified and date added columns and retake that screenshot. Mine that are broke are all pre-Apple music.

Your problem is the one I was actually concerned about. A lot of people thought, myself included, that my songs that I added were being stored as my songs and they aren’t. Unless you move songs back to iTunes it reads as that greyed out Apple Music status. So if you don’t have the songs anymore and they are ones Apple doesn’t have as an album, they’re just gone now.

You might be correct, that the songs before Apple Music might be that. However, I have created a playlist with songs my daughter likes. Few of the songs are greyed out, however, my wife is subscribed to that playlist and she can play all songs...

So I've checked that again and I believe it is not related to the release of Apple Music. I have found many song, which I added to the library after the Apple Music was released. And since the Apple Music release, I didn't add any song manually. Only from Apple Music. See another screenshot:

Spent time on the phone with support. She really tried but did not have a solution. Made sure my sync is on etc. She believes the system is still syncing. I've waited a few days but no improvement. Looking back here again for solutions.

Slow and time consuming, but I have gone to some grayed out songs that say "Apple Music". Then right clicked>Show in Apple Music. This is not always successful - that is, it sometimes brings up completely different album/song. If it's correct I deleted the song in my library, then downloaded it again.

The odd thing is, some of the newly downloaded songs from Apple Music returned a cloud status of "No Longer Available". There are different cloud status for songs from the same album. I went on to check sync. Checking my iPhone, it does sync up. So I'm not clear what the status "No Longer Available" truly means, how it affects your cloud status, or if it is accurate.

As someone mentioned, you do loose your play count. Not sure how important that is exactly.

Today the songs that said "No Longer Available" are now showing "Apple Music".

Going further, I checked if my "Music Match" was active in the iTunes Store. All of the grayed out cloud status icons have the dotted cloud next to them. This apparently means "The song is being matched, but the process hasn't been completed yet." It hasn't had any impact yet.

Twitter Apple support is a lot better than their text message support for some reason. But they’re waiting for me to look at what it looks like on a laptop.

If you do “remove from library” and readd it’ll work. But obviously that breaks playlists and if you have a bunch of songs it’ll be a giant pain.

So you’re always going to get ones that drop off because there is a change in music rights. Like the Latin Simone one, It doesn’t even show up when I search that album so my guess is it’s on an old or different version of that album. The Play It Be It one doesn’t show up either. So I think the rights are gone there. However, the fix is actually what you already mentioned. Well I mean it’s a workaround I figured out, it’s not a fix. For whatever reason, if you have those old songs tied to your Apple ID it can’t play that song anymore even if you pull the correct version in.

So here is the fix - and please test this on a couple songs with a test album first so you understand the steps and don’t blow up your library.

1) Send the playlist to another device, I used my wife’s but it has to be a device that doesn’t have you signed or signed in with a different Apple ID so you can actually send the playlist.

2) On the second device, the songs will automatically map to a current version of that song. I have no idea why we can’t just refresh the mapping on a device but you can’t.

3) Duplicate that playlist on the second device. While in the playlist hit the three dots in the upper right, click add to playlist, name the new playlist and create it.

4) Delete bad songs on the first device.

5) Send the playlist back to device one from device two. This will remap all the songs to whatever version is out there now and ignore the old mapping.

You’ll want to duplicate all the playlists first so you don’t lose songs on multiple playlists. Because as soon as you delete the songs they will drop from the playlist. Since they aren’t in your library. You can also remove step 3, but that’s kinda risky if something maps weird. It’s better to just duplicate it.

I would also make a playlist with all your songs to remap all the the other songs not in a playlist and do the same thing.

I think the real question is why there isn’t an option to refresh mapping on a song within Apple Music or iTunes.

I’m still working with Apple Support. My thought is a lot of those albums they dropped rights on because there is a new version, the rest of the mess is unintended consequences of them not realizing song from pre Apple Music that got uploaded are causing issues with adding the same song back in.

hmmm, that's a good workaround, works great!

It has only one problem - I have many playlists based on play counts and when I dod that, I lose the counts. However, still better to have the songs without it than no songs at all.

If Apple Support give you any solution, please post it here.

I have the same problem, mostly songs I downloaded prior to Apple Music launch.

Some of my observations... The songs are not greyed out on iPhone. So they play OK on iPhone. Also, my daughter's MacBook doesn't have the songs greyed out, even though we have the same Apple Music family account.

I rarely play songs on my MacBook. I only use Apple Music on MacBook to make playlists, etc. I thought about redownloading every greyed out song, but that would take many months to redo. So at this point, I'll just redownload the song if I need to, since they play ok on iPhone.

I sincerely hope Apple can fix this, though I doubt than can/will...

Your daughters one makes sense when you send the playlist, it maps to whatever is available that matches the song playback, assuming the person has a different Apple ID. This is why this whole thing is dumb. If the song doesn’t match the region it should just retry to map it automatically.

Is your iPhone on iOS 16?

My daughter is under my plan and signed in with my Apple ID. But her songs are not greyed out.

Fortunately, I have all my 'pre-Apple Music' songs on an external hard drive. If I redownload them, the no longer get greyed out. It does show that I downloaded them 'today' but the play count and all other information seems not reset...

No improvement - songs still not matched ⅔ of my library will not play. Theses songs are in iTunes and Apple Music but will not play unless I delete them and reload them. We are talking Hundreds of songs that I've added since 2007.

Hi,

I've just noticed that after the update of all apple devices do iOS 16.2/iPadOS 16.2 and MacOS 13.1, many of the songs are available again. Not all of them, but I would say 90% of them are back :)