Greyed-out songs problem

OK so my wife was having this problem and all sorts of complaining so I figured how hard could it be, it's a Mac right. So I had a couple of goes and sure enough songs she had in her playlist would not transfer across to her iPhone. The problem the songs greyed out. Which led me here. I just couldn't believe it could be so difficult as all the supposed solutions posted so I had a closer look.

When I checked the greyed out songs in her playlist against here entire 'My music' I discovered that the songs in her 'My Music' didn't appear greyed out and DIDN'T have the tick in the lefthand column. Those that appeared normally in her playlist were ticked. Her sync setting were to only sync ticked songs so obviously although the songs existed in a playlist, and would play if double clicked, they would not sync to the iPhone because they weren't ticked.

After clicking all the appropriate songs in her entire 'My Music' they were no longer greyed out in her playlists and synced quite happily. So simple 🙂

For Apple to grey out songs in your playlist that haven't been ticked seems like a good hint to me that something is wrong with your set-up but to be truly Mac-like when you go to sync your iDevice it should tell you that there are songs in your playlist that aren't ticked and will not be synced. Or when you select in iTunes the playlists you want synced to your phone it should warn you if any of the songs are unticked before you even get to the sync stage.

TIP: To tick or untick a bunch of songs, first Shift Click to hilight the many songs and then Control - Click for the popup menu which has 'Untick selection' or 'Tick selection' depending on your needs.

Amazing.. this worked for me! I actually do not sync music, I only stream through iTunes Match but I had 11 hours of these greyed out songs always showing in the Music Tab under my Device and your suggestion has finally allowed me to delete them 🙂

Simple, effective and quick - many thanks indeed.

http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-fix-grayed-out-songs-on-the-iphone/

Amazing, this solved my problem. So simple, but I never really paid much attention to the tick marks. Thanks WunWingLoh!

Mark

I finally got a fix for the silent gray songs! It's a little tedious but you could just do it a little at a time. Right click on the gray song title, then scroll down to the last item "Check..." and right click it, and , Voila! The title turns black again and plays fine.

i know this is old but found it by searching on Google for the problem. had a purchased song that wouldn't sync from iTunes to iPhone. eventually i just re-authorized the computer from the iTunes "Store" menu. now the song will copy.

Right click and create acc version. Re-sync and it works for me.

http://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-fix-grayed-out-songs-on-the-iphone/

This worked for me (THANK YOU!!) but it was a tad tedious. Also, on some of my tracks, the first time I right-clicked "Make ACC version" was not a choice. I had to right click them three times for it to show up. So if you don't see it at first, try again. Twice.

Apple, your products are nice but your software *****. Get it together FPS.

I had random tracks and full albums that were greyed out, and the songs would only play if I clicked them, otherwise it would skip over them. I found that if you right click the tracks and simply click "check selection" all the tracks suddenly appeared as normal (not greyed out) and played normally.

THANK YOU.

As far as I can tell, every song that had this problem was encoded with a Variable Bit Rate (VBR) rather than a fixed number like 256. These are songs that I had bought from Amazon or directly from an artist. Other tracks from the same artist bought at the same time did NOT have this problem. Only if the encoding used VBR. (To see, click on song in iTunes, Get Info, and look on the File tab. See if Bit Rate is a number followed by "VBR".)

"Check Selection" on the files didn't seem to modify any of the tags, but now they are not greyed out and can be played in playlists or a whole album at a time.

Incidentally the same files were greyed out in Apple Music, when my cloud music library was viewed from a different Mac..

UPDATE: I have since found some VBR songs from Amazon that did not have this problem. So take my VBR theory with a grain of salt. But what I do know is, "Uncheck Selection" greys out the songs and prevents them from playing in playlists and whole albums. "Check Selection" enables them again. Maybe it's a feature but darned if I know what its good for, or when the heck my songs first became unchecked.

If you want to find all of your unchecked songs in your iTunes library, switch to Songs view and look at the left-most column. It's a checkbox! Click on the column header to sort all the unchecked songs to the bottom of the list. Now you can select them all in one go and check them. If you make any changes and are on Apple Music, go to File->Library->Update iCloud Music Library to force the changes to be uploaded immediately.

Open preferences

See GENERAL page

"Untick" SHOW LIST TICKBOXES

OK and close.

When you "tick" the SHOW LIST TICKBOXES dialog, the SYNC feature only responds to items that are ticked.

Don't know what this SHOW TICKED LIST feature was originally intended for, but I guess it could have been used to discern between entertainment media on your device and the other audio files and content that iTunes finds in folders. This would be the stuff that is on the device you might intend for other non-entertainment purposes - e.g. dictation, voicenotes etc.

I found a pretty simple fix if you go into your iTunes on your mac or pc go to your apple device (iPhone or iPod) then scroll down to Options Uncheck "Sync w/ this iPhone over Wi-Fi" and then Check "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC" then click the "Sync" button. This restored all of my music.

FYI - I tried the suggestion to click on each individual song to "Create AAC Version" before I discovered the above fix and it did not work for me.

I Have tried every option in this forum and also gotten a new iPod and the problem returns each time! I downloaded 2 songs from the iTunes Store today and 1 synced just fine and the second will not sync .....any help would be greatly appreciated

right clicking it and choosing "check selections" should fix the problem