Songs greyed out and have stop button. Wont play!

The music you see with the "stop button" is music in the cloud, and the icon is the download icon. As a song is downloaded, the outer circle will grow wider in a clockwise direction to be your download progress indicator. The red box in the center is the "stop download" button to tell iOS to stop downloading that song. If you connect to wifi, the downloads should process much faster than over cellular data.

I have the same problem with iPhone 5s and iPod touch 5, I sync them from my PC, and it seems they just accept some song then started getting greyed!

Help us!

Anyone come up with a solution for this? I have the same thing. In trying to find a way to fix this I went to the General Settings | Music and turned off Show All Music so it nows says "Only music that has been downloaded to this device will be shown." When I return to my playlists the songs aren't there anymore. So that confirms they're not downloaded... the next question is why? They were there and available 2-3 weeks ago. Other posts (on other websites) suggested doing a manual sync, which I've done through iTunes and that's not changing anything. When I look at the directory tree of my phone when it's connect to iTunes those missing songs are listed in the playlists but grayed out and have a dotted circle in the first column. There are also new playlists that I've selected to be downloaded to my phone that show up in the iTunes directory of my phone but are not actually on my phone. When I check the Sync settings for my phone in iTunes, I have the Music page set to Selected playlists, artists, etc. In addition to it not syncing correctly, at some point multiple copies of playlists are being created both in iTunes that I didn't create. I'm starting to think this a problem with iTunes. I did update the iTunes software some time in the past few weeks. It's the most recent version of iTunes 11.1.3.

any new developments?

To resolve this, connect your iPhone to your Mac (or PC) and press "Sync" button. This will copy all missing songs to your device.

Ive tried this and it didnt work. Songs are still greyed out and wont play.

Found a solution. Got to itunes, and navigate to the top left corner of the screen. Click the dropdown menu and hover over the library option. The next drop down box to appear will give you the option to turn on/off home sharing. If it's turned on, turn it off. If it's turned off, leave it off. Thank the lord for Apple and it's gr8 support.

Un-sync all your music to remove it from the device, then restart (hold down the home button along with the sleep/wake button until you see the apple, then let go). Now re-sync your music.

Your songs are trying to download onto the phone, press the button on the side and it should let you listen afterwards.

I posted on another thread... I literally stayed up all night trying to sync my music from updated iTunes software to brand new iPod Touch with iOS 7.1

I absolutely could not get many of the songs to sync... had ripped from CD versions of double-disc sets and one of the discs would sync and the other would not (would be grayed out if I looked in "music" on my iPod.

Although I have iTunes Match, I (obviously) had not turned it on because I wanted to manually sync stuff that I had downloaded in my iTunes music library (i.e., music was there.... not just in the cloud)... because the whole purpose of my getting the iPod was because I was going to use it in an area where there was no WiFi (so iTunes Match was obviously not available)...

I had to go through my library and clean it up (it was a mess... it looks like every time I updated iTunes Match it would place duplicate and triplicate copies with that double cloud thing with the line through it... found techniques in these forums to make the deletions easier.

Reset the iPod, turned on iTunes Match, everything in the iTunes Match library (every song in my iTunes library) showed up (the "cloud" version) and I just went through and downloaded every album that I wanted on the iPod. I turned off the "Show all Music" feature so that when I am connected to WiFi I just see the stuff that I chose to download to the iPod.

IMO, all this stuff has become WAY too complicated... bugs in iTunes combined with bugs in iOS7.... too many places to set different preferences.... I have found the Apple Support articles to be generally unhelpful (although I did learn that the double clouds with a line through them meant that it was an exact duplicate song that hadn't uploaded to iCloud, and I did learn (from this forum, not from support) that the way to avoid the duplicates and triplicates was to go into the main iTunes Preferences, select the Advanced Tab and DE-select "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library).

I consider myself reasonably semi-intelligent, but things have become a mess. If you have iTunes Match, you might want to just download stuff from the cloud. No solution if you don't.

I long for the days (like a year or so ago!) when all you had to do was drag stuff from one device to another... or when manually syncing actually synced so I didn't have to spend time pushing the download cloud on umpteen albums....

And there are so many threads on this "grayed" out stuff... wish they would make it all easier.....

Message was edited by: isaacfromsioux falls

This is getting to be ridiculous. I am aggravated and frustrated. I have purchased these songs either directly from iTunes app on my phone, through my PC, or through the physical cd. I have the 64GB iPhone 4s. Just keep all of my songs on the iphone. I'm to the point where I researching saving all my music and just switching over to Android/GooglePlay. It seems to be less of a headache than trying to research the why of the unplayable songs and how to permanently get them back onto my device. I have been an Apple-ite for 6 years but I think my time here is done. Thanks for all the confusion, Apple. :c

Hey all, I figured something out that may help.

I had explicit music blocked on my iPhone 5s, and (for example) was trying to sync " Some Nights" - Fun, from my Windows PC to my iPhone. Not realizing this song had an E for explicit music, I kept trying to sync that song, and it never would. Once I did some searching online I found out what the E meant. I went into my restrictions and changed that setting so I could sync the song. When I did this, it was showing about 10 copies of that song (faded out gray, with a red stop next to it) I hit the stop over and over... nothing happened. After trying multiple different ways to get rid of the 10 copies of the song trying to sync to my phone, I finally figured out what to to.

I had to go to sync music section on iTunes, go to that one song and:

1. Sync the song. (this would sync one of the 10 copies of the song on my phone, and after it would sync I could delete it by swiping it over and hitting the delete)

2. Ok now I am down to 9 copies of the same song, so I unchecked the sync for that song, then hit "Apply" and it would take off one of the 9 grayed out copies of the song on the phone.

I repeated step 1. and 2. until I was down to 1 copy of the song that I could play.

Now I know you guys aren't saying you had multiple copies of the songs or albums, but I thought I would share this info, because you may be able to do something like this to get your music working right again.

If you have any questions about this, just ask, I will help with all I can

So, the same thing happened for me. Multiple songs from multiple albums were shaded and there was a pink stop button next to them. Clicking the stop button did nothting.

MY SOLUTION:

I updated my i-phone to the latest software and now I do not have that issue with any of my songs.

I've had the same problem on my phone.

I connected it to iTunes and deleted all the music from my phone. Then I rebooted the computer AND the phone, reconnedted it and put the music back on the phone and it worked 🙂