Greyed out songs on iphone after iOS 5 update

This is rediculous! I'm infuriated that I can't get my music over to my **** phone. Why is this even an issue? I've tried everything. I'm headed to the apple store this afternoon.

Hello? Apple? Getting impatient!!! There is an obvious need for support here!

I could not sync songs to my iphone 5. Itunes showed as grey from "on this phone" list. I could not see the songs at all from the music app in my phone.

I waisted my 6 hours trying to fix this. I tried almost everything above. I think I now understand "why" and "how".

During my very first sync something went wrong. Maybe I have interrupted the sync prematurely by pushing a button or something else. Two songs remained to be synced and they were corrupted. When I wanted to sync again, itunes automatically tried to sync those two songs first -before starting with the rest, "newly added" songs. As these two songs were corrupted, they "blocked" the process.

I have also tried to delete everything a couple of times. Only the last time i noticed that every grey song deleted from the phone except those two "unnamed" ones.

So I bit the bitter pill, made a full back-up and restore the phone. The two corrupted songs were cleared and I was able to sync the songs I chose from Itunes.

Everything works fine now.

All this took me 42 minutes. But I guess this depends the amount of data in your phone.

Hi people! I found a simple way to solve all the issues. Just delete ur iTunes on mac and reinstall it. It solves all the problem. 🙂

Totally agree with atos72's analysis on the origin of the problem.

And Galileo634's solution works for me to tackle it.

It took me 3 min to install the software ( I happened to be using DiskAid (PC software) + FileApp (Ipad App) ), and delete the whole folder "iPad\Media\iTunes_Control folder",

plus another 30 min for the ipad to download all the purchased app's, which I dare not interupt.

Happily, none of my previous data on the ipad was lost.

But I still can see the broken music file in itunes that caused the problem.

I manually deleted this broken file through itunes, and then dragged all my music over to the ipad from my library. None of them turns grey. Yeah~~

Thanks to both of Galileo634 and atos72.

Hope APPLE can fix silly problems like this.

Below is the credited post by Galileo634.

==============================

Galileo634

I bought an iPhone 5 and could not add music to it. Same problem: grey songs. After hours searching forums and blogs I found this solution. Work for me! Now I manually add songs using iTunes and no problem. Hope it helps.

1. Download and install iExplorer http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

2. Plug in device first, then open iExplorer

3. Delete the iPhone\Media\iTunes_Control folder (you may want to copy this, just in case)

4. Restart the iPhone / iPad

5. Start iTunes. Not restore iPhone from back up, select New iPhone (don't worry, you will not lost apps or data on your iPhone doing this)

6. Add music manually with iTunes

Same Problem: The songs play fine in iTunes, but when you try to transfer them to the iPhone4 (using all updated software and firmware) they show up in the iTunes Device browser as Grey songs with a dashed/dotted circle. This happened with songs I purchased from iTunes over the years (.m4a and .m4p) ...but it also happened with AIF and WAVs that I recorded and mixed myself!!!!!!!!!

Trials: I tried various things for several hours, including wiping iPhone to factory settings, dumping iTunes media folder and rebuilding, deleting iTunes database files so iTunes would rebuild them, deauthorizing, re-authorizing, I tried the iExplorer trick above. None of this worked.

Solution: I finally got it working by deleting the iTunes app and the entire "\Music\iTunes" folder. A reboot was required to empty my trash because "iTunesHelper" was still running. (Not sure if there is a better way to uninstall iTunes, but I just dragged it all to the trash). After a fresh install of iTunes everything worked great, so far...

Closure: The problem is particularly frustrating when you create your own songs and you cannot move them to your mobile listening device. I first thought the greyed-out/dotted circles was anti-piracy gone bad, but when things are working properly it still shows the dotted circles very briefly, but they fill in as the song loads. For some reason the songs wouldnt load before.....maybe it was anti-piracy gone bad...not sure... I wish Apple would acknowledge the problem. No mention of it in any of their "help".

--

Respectfully,
Steve French

This solution also worked for me! Thanks Galileo634 and spriff for reposting!

I click on my iphones backup, but the media folder is not an option, am I doing something wrong in iExplorer?

I was having the same problem - greyed out songs on both the phone and itunes, and couldn't transfer songs from itunes to the phone. I fixed it by clearing out everything on the phone, unchecking all the songs, then syncing the phone again, and then selecting in the 'summary' section of the phone window on itunes 'manually manage music and videos.' Then I clicked 'apply changes.' Now I can pass music from itunes to the phone.

Hey lads finally got mine to work there.

Basically after selecting Preferences - Devices " Prevent Ipods from sync" thing.

Turning everything off, then back on, reboot my mac basically. i noticed the iphone still tried to do some syncing.

Best way is to go through all the iphones categories, "Summary" "Info" "Apps" etc etc, & make sure not a single thing is trying to sync to the iphone. Once its stops trying to sync anything, delete all your music from the phone.

Then finally click "Sync" from the iphone. It should finally say syncing & updating.

Then only afterwards try re-install your music files & it will work again!

Galileo634 answer did it for me as well, after literaly weeks of searching. Thanks Man you rock!!!!!!!!

Galileo634

Re: Greyed out songs on iphone after iOS 5 update

Jan 4, 2013 5:23 AM (in response to jmommy06)

I bought an iPhone 5 and could not add music to it. Same problem: grey songs. After hours searching forums and blogs I found this solution. Work for me! Now I manually add songs using iTunes and no problem. Hope it helps.

1. Download and install iExplorer http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

2. Plug in device first, then open iExplorer

3. Delete the iPhone\Media\iTunes_Control folder (you may want to copy this, just in case)

4. Restart the iPhone / iPad

5. Start iTunes. Not restore iPhone from back up, select New iPhone (don't worry, you will not lost apps or data on your iPhone doing this)

6. Add music manually with iTunes

The iExplorer thing worked for me too, but ONLY when I also included deletion of the contents within CloudAssets, Downloads, LoFiCloudAssets, and Purchases.

Not sure if all were required, but it didn't hurt anything and it finally got rid of my grayed-out songs. Thank you!

Thank You Katdlowe!!! What you posted worked for me!! Just to repost for others.....

I tried all of the replies on this forum which failed to solve the problem. I just got off the phone with Apple and the problem has been resolved. All of the songs from my iTunes library are lit up on my phone and play. Here is what worked for me:

1. Ensure that all of the music is in your iTunes library

2. Sync your phone, but uncheck the Sync music, causing all of the music on your phone to be deleted

3. Once this sync is complete, recheck the Sync Music and re-sync your phone

I have this problem I havent found the reason why it happened. I sync 5000 songs to my Iphone but when I sync it again the next day, all songs has exclamation mark on it and cant be played. I put all the songs once again (takes 2 hours) and then when I sync it again during the night, once again all the songs were grayed out with exclamation mark on it. I dont know whether this cause by the Itunes or IOS 7 but it almost makes me stomping at my device.

Galileo634's answer totally worked. The only additional thing I had to do was restart my device (4S) and all of the newly added songs were there.

I also have the iTunes Match blues but that's a different topic. 😉