Q: Greyed out songs on iphone after iOS 5 update

What happened to lynzwales was exactly my experience too. It seemed to get stuck at the corrupted songs and once I got rid of them, all was fine.

somehow it randomly happened! now i havce anothe rissue ,cant get photos on to ipad 2!!!!!

We came across this problem on my wife's iPhone 4S and the following worked for us:

1. DO back up your iPhone using iTunes. This is very important since this is what you'll use later.

2. "Erase All Content and Settings" in your iPhone. This is done on iPhone as follows:

  Go to Settings -> General -> Reset (at the bottom of the menu) and then tap on "Erase All Content and Settings".  Confirm through a series of warnings.  Don't get scared by the warnings since you've already got your stuff backed up.

3. After your iPhone is up and running again, do whatever you did when you first got your iPhone (country, keyboard, etc.).

4. At the end of the setup process, iPhone will ask if you want to set your iPhone up as a new phone or restore your back-up from a computer. Select the option for restoration.  Connect your iPhone to the computer if it's not.

5. Follow the steps as shown to restore your backup.

Good luck.

It took two months but with Apple Support's help yesterday,we found a corrupt Music Atrtist that was causing the problem. After deleting all of the music by wiping iPhone clean, restore then add music maunually by artist about 20 at a time. After hundreds of of songs added, it stopped when I got to one Artist.  I deleted the music from iTunes (move to trash), poor Cheaptrick, they were the problem for me. Then sync "all music" and it worked fine. I had this problem for two iPhones and two iPads. Life is great today with all of my music, photos and Apps. Good Luck

@nsk2:

Any insight into how/why these songs are corrupted?  Could you still play them in iTunes OK?  Did Apple provide any better way that you could identify these tracks?  Seems a pretty lengthy trial-and-error process, but i'm thinking if it can't transfer the track there must be a log/diagnostic message somewhere that could help pinpoint where to look.

Thanks for sharing.

Springsteen was the one causing me problems, so it is not isolated to Cheap Trick.

This was my problem, however the same files worked fine on my 3gs. One file was tying up the while thing.

Finally got my iPhone working like normal again. I deleted the first album that was greyed out, put the songs back on and they all worked. My guess is that when importing for the first time via wifi, I clicked canceled and corrupted the file. Remove the corrupted file from itunes and it will skip it and continue to sync the other files.

Same issue...happened only over wifi sync...got error these 5 songs couldn't be synced so I deleted from iTunes library and just plugged phone to laptop via USB and synced that way and no greyed songs.....seems like a wifi sync issue when error with syncing track.

I think I might have found a solution for this problem. I was having the same issue with a few hundred songs just being greyed out. I didn't know why some were and others weren't until I sorted the songs by file type (View>View Options>Check Kind Box). Every song that wouldn't be synced was a Purchased AAC filetype. I sorted by kind and selected all the Purchased AAC filetypes and right clicked then selected convert to AAC. Once the songs were converted to AAC they could be added to my iPhone. The only issue is that I had 2 of every one of those songs one in AAC and the other in Purchased AAC. So just delete the duplicates in PAAC and you should be good to go. Hopefully this works for others!

great, so i restored my iphone and now my old solution doesn't work anymore. I've been trying for days and nothing works is there an organized list or blog of solutions to this problem? My iphone will sync like 5 random albums worth of about 3500 songs. I've run my library through one of those mp3 fix programs and all my files are perfectly healthy. Is there a reason apple has not been addressing this directly?

This is very annoying. I finally fixed it by deleting the Album Folder from the Itunes Music folder in the Finder. Surprisingly, it detected this change and started working (with the music files from the trash). I then moved them back and they all worked. Crazy.

Converting or Create AAC Version of 'Purchased AAC Audio File' worked for me. Odd that it is only some Purchased AAC Audio File that this is a problem with.

For me. I bought both Korn - Path of Totality and Limp Bizkit - Golden Cobra the same day. Korn was greyed out and Limp Bizkit sync just fine. Doesn't say anything for iTunes taste, the Korn album is way better.

So now I guess I need to build a smart playlist with all 'Purchased AAC Audio Files' and create an AAC version, then go back and delete the Purchased. Probably not going to do that and wait for apple to correct this issue natively.

After many hours of reading and trying various fixes from this thread I found something that worked for me.

My music are in various folders (local PC HDD, network storage & Itunes purchased stuff

- Selected "Copy files to Itunes Media Folder when adding to Library". This can be found in Edit\Preferences\Advanced. (this may not be a required step, but it was just in case Itunes was having folder name problems)

- Deleted all music from Itunes (10.5.2.11)

- Synch phone (actually didn't need to do this found out in the end)

- Add each folder that contain your music back into iTunes

- Setup Playlist again (as they have nothing in them once the music is deleted)

- Resync iPhone 4s

Everything worked this time!! Wow, it's been a long evening.....

After exhaustive efforts which incuded everything mentioned above (Apple Genius bar, new iTunes and reimport music, restoring my iPhone 4S more times than I care to mention, runing mp3 scans, etc) I finally found a solution that worked for me.

I joined iMatch. After 72 hours all 6000 songs were scanned and there were about 35 songs that couldn't be analyzed and labeled with an "error cloud" and I deleted these songs. Once I did that the sync worked flawlessly (both wired and wifi).

So I think the sync issue boils down to corrupt files. The issue is finding the corrupt files.

I am too lazy to sync "x" number of songs at a time as suggested above.

While it pained me to front Apple the $29 for iMatch (& iMatch has plenty of issues as well) for something that is clearly an iOS5 bug, using iMatch worked and it was convenient. So if you are pulling your hair out and have tried everything this solution may help you.

Cheers