Greyed-out songs problem

I discovered that if my iTunes music was in MP3 format, and I transferred it to my iPhone and then did a sync, the music did not transfer and it showed up on the phone "grayed out".

I re-imported the music into iTunes in AAC format, transferred it again and synced, and it actually transferred and showed up normally.

Of course, it mystifies me why one does not get an error when transferring MP3 files. Simply having them show up gray is not very helpful Apple!!!!

I cant believe how crazy simple this was after hours of messing around!!

- click the iPhone button (with what looks like an eject style simbol on it) neat top right of iTunes (on computer).

- click "on This iPhone" (on the bar near the top with Summary Apps Music etc..."On This iPhone" is the last on the right.

- NOW bottom left of iTunes there is a Gear symbol next to a Plus ➕ symbol.

click the Gear and the only thing that pops up is the word DELETE. click it and every one of those horrable greyed out tracks disappear 🙂

hope this helps

Hey Movitar, are you using a PC?

I'm looking at my iTunes now and don't see an eject style symbol in the top right of iTunes and I don't have a 'This iPhone' button to click in the summary bar which makes me think that I'm not on the same machine as you.

I removed my grey songs as explained on a different post which you have seen, but am always on the look for different ways to achieve the same outcome.

Cheers.

This post is really old but i was having the same problem with my iphone and jacob's advice helped me without even noticing it. I connected my iphone and in the music library of my iphone, deleted one of the greyed out songs, ejected (stopping the iphone sync) the iphone and resprung it, connected the iphone again and added the same song that i had deleted, automaticlly iTunes started copying the missing songs, i had the problem resolved in under 10 minutes. With all of my songs.

The problem was that I couldn't actually hi light anything at all so could not use your method. Anyway I've solved the problem by downloading a iphone explorer program which delves a bit deeper and basically deleted everything in a few folders. IE purchases folder, downloads folder and few in a itunes folder. It's safe. Once deleted sync again and greyed out stuff GONE. !!!!!! Program is free and called iphone explorer

after 2 hours of scrolling through multiple forums, I did exactly what niennara said and it worked perfectly! thanks so much!

Note for anyone trying to follow Movitar's instructions .. you have to disable the sidebar to see the "on this iPhone" / "on this iPad" tab.

That said, I don't see a gear symbol with a delete option. Wish I did!

To nuke the ghost files (I had thousands of them .. even if I completely deleted the Music's app data on the device, and then set it to sync music with no albums or artists or genres selected, so there was nothing seen in the Music app at all) .. I used iFunbox, a utility that lets you dig around in the file structure of your iOS device. Although somewhat dubiously named, it worked very well.

Open iFunbox, scroll down to "Raw File System", find the "Purchases" folder, and delete it.

For good measure I then bought PhoneClean, which deletes application caches on the device.

Presto, my thousands of ghost files gone.

Watching carefully, I see ghost files showing back up each time I make a new purchase. Once I saw both a 128kbps and 256kbbs of the same newly purchased song get lodged in there. Why would the music store give you a 128kbps file? Odd.

Anyway. Clean out the cruft and see if your ghost songs disappear.

Hi,

Regarding the fix I found: I had a quick look at the problem of " no gear appearing". I found its another typical glitch where theres an illogical fix that does works.

Once you get the the part where I said -

"NOW bottom left of iTunes there is a Gear symbol next to a Plus symbol"

if you do not see the Gear symbol, which I also did not see (when checking why it hasnt worked for some others on this thread) do the following...

Click done (top roght of iTunes) >>> Close iTunes >>> (normal X symbol, very top left of iTunes) >>> Now in the Dock, where all the various icons are (This is for a Mac, hopefuly it would work the same in the task bar for Windows) Right Click over the iTunes Symbol>>> Click Quit.

Now when you reopen iTunes and do the exact same process I listed originally you should see the Gear appear ...

- click the iPhone button (with what looks like an eject style symbol on it) near top right of iTunes (on computer)

- click " on this iPhone" ( on the bar near the top with summary Apps, Music, etc)... "on this iPhone" is the last on the right.

- NOW bottom left of iTunes there is a Gear symbol next to a plus symbol. Click the gear and the only thing that pops up is the word DELETE. Click it and every one of those horrible greyed out tracks disappear

Thank you so much for this. It really was simple and worked right away. Nothing else seemed right since the problem was on the desktop and not on a mobile device.

I never had this problem with my iPod 4 but it is a continuous problem with my iPod 5. I have determined that the solution is just a lot of patience. I do only manually synching as I don't trust auto synching. First I make sure all songs are checked/highlighted. Then when I highlight and drag songs from iTunes to my device, I watch the status bar at the top of the library screen. If it processes too quickly chances are iTunes did nothing. If I don't see the changes I want in the device library, I drag again. It could take up to 3 or 4 tries. But once the grey songs appear and the status bar says "Preparing to update", all is good. It just may take up to half an hour before the songs are finally ready to play. Hope this helps.

I have this problem too. I decided to put the song in a separate smart playlist and sync it. Now there's one greyed out copy of the song, and one regular copy of that song on my iPhone. I have a Mac.

Then I told iTunes to delete all of the songs on my iPhone and reload them. I'm back to one grayed out copy of that song and the other one is gone. If I select it on my phone, the next song plays. That song plays fine on my iPad, it's just broken on my phone.

Hmm, I'm logged in as myself, but this site is saying "User 'asfahan' is banned from posting content. Let me see what happens when I log on again...

I tried a few things. First, I changed the song's attributes as described by someone else in this thread. Then I tried deleting the song from iTunes, unchecking the songs synchronization and synchronizing. And then I discovered that my phone's iTunes selection was still there - not just the phantom song, but lots of songs. So I figure what I need to do is find out how to delete all of the songs on my iPhone, or at least the phantom song. I have no idea how to do that, I assumed that if they weren't synchronized from my iTunes, they would disappear. I was wrong.

If you look in the top corner of the itunes window you will see an arrow pointing down. Click on it and all you stopped downloads will appear and you can restart the download...