Why are some songs greyed out on iTunes?

I followed the steps in the "answered" post to troubleshoot the greyed out problem and now entire albums are missing!!

Ah ok, I had to reconnect with iCloud match. An additional step!

but same tracks are still greyed out.

I was fed up, I noticed that most if not all the greyed out songs were ones that came from CD's I imported years ago or songs purchased on Amazon and other sites.

After I signed up for iTunes Match I deleted a lot of my library in order to save space on my hard drive.

What I understand now is that the greyed out songs are the ones that iTunes was unable to match. And since I deleted them there was no file to reference. My solution was to delete all the greyed out songs so that they didn't annoy me anymore or interrupt playback and replace what I could from my backups (I no longer have the CDs but backed up all the music from the CDs onto external hard drives). I couldn't recover all the songs but I was at a point where I didn't care and I just wanted a more organized and synced library of music.

Thanks so so much TPick43 - this really, really helped me - works perfectly...was driving me nut as it worked at first and then suddenly...nothing! Preferences -> General and check the boxlinking to iCloud and all works fine across all my devices. Now need to check it works with Family Sharing too...

I tried to find my issue in here, but I am not sure it is or maybe I have just overlooked my answer. I have an album that has the majority of the songs greyed out in the iTunes library. I can play them from the library, but when I try to make a playlist out of songs in the album, only the non-greyed out songs will burn to a CD. In other words, when I move 6 of the songs to the playlist and try to burn them to a cd, only the ones that aren't greyed out will record.

What am I missing?

Thank you,

Jim

This worked perfect. I right clicked on each song scrolled down to the bottom to check selection clicked on it and now the songs are not greyed out and the album plays from start to finish without having to click on the next song. Thanks so much for the info. I have only done this on 1 album but I have several with this problem..so now I can fix it.

Notice that most of the songs greyed out are the most famous ones. In my repository it happened on the La Traviata's Drinking song from National Philharmonic but not from the Berliner one, and some other pieces that are famous but not that wide-known or not presented by a top-class performer. Companies may charge more for the copyrights for some of pieces in an album and Apple may think it doesn't deserve to buy.

Found a solution to my problem. When you are looking at "My Music", look on top right of iTunes under search, there is a dropdown where you can choose songs, albums, artist etc. Click on Songs and you will notice that the greyed out songs are not checked. I'm not sure how this defaults, or gets set, but if you check the box, the songs will now appear and be playable. If somone finds out how to ignore this checkbox or can find out how to select all without having to click each song, it would be appreciated 🙂

You can check all selections by going to the My Music, then on upper right, select Songs instead of Albums, select one song, then press Cmd-A to select all music, right click/two-finger click, in the context menu select "Check Selection," and done.

This is really bizarre. The "check" step worked perfectly for me. The reason I was really confused is that all the songs in the playlist played perfectly fine yesterday (!!!), and today some of them became unchecked randomly. ***? I did not "uncheck" them for sure. Nobody is using this computer except me.

Apple is completely silent about this whole issue with iTunes and Music app on iPhone as if it does not exist. in fact, there are so many issues, I do not even known where to start. For instance, the "Shuffle" button issue is completely impossible to comprehend.

I don't know if someone else has posted this yet, but I was experiencing the same issue, and then when I figured out what the problem was, proceeded to connect my palm to my face very forcefully. At some undetermined point, a large section of my music had been "unchecked", that is to say that all of the music has a checkbox next to it, and apparently checking v. unchecking affects the playability of the music. So all I did was select all of my music by song, right click and click "check selection" and all of my music was suddenly playable. I hope this helps somebody.

Tried this and just lost 600 songs from before I had Apple music. All Apple music has been since I had it is a disaster!! Constantly have grey cloud icons buy all my music and it doesn't allow me to listen to any of it, and now losing 600 songs just tops it off...

Apple's sync function is indeed quirky! In my case, all the problem music to be transferred was already showing as "checked". BUT, simply toggling just one track to the unchecked condition, then toggling it back apparently broke the Sync log jam on that item as well as all similar greyed out tracks. Had tried for days to command the thing to Sync, but it would initiate, go through a couple of the steps, then hang on the Apple smiley face (infuriating) without progressing to any kind of track transfer progress. Every attempt to sync left me with the same non event, but when the check box thing is tweaked, something in the Apple OS says "Well....hmmmm.... hah, maybe this guy actually wants me to do something about the greyed out unplayable stuff!"

All the other log out, log in advice did Nada, but this apparently worked.

In attempting to find a remedy for this problem (this answer did not work in my case), I took a look at the devices I had authorized for my iTunes account and realized that I had two previous iPhones authorized. They were both also named the same (I am a creature of habit). I deauthorized them and the sync session that was in mid session immediately began adding the 763 greyed out items to my new iPhone. It is anecdotal, but in my case, I believe that having several devices with the same name was confusing the sync process. My post hoc conclusion is that, a) There are several reasons that specific songs may not synchronize properly from your computer to your other devices, b) give your devices unique names, and c) deactivate old devices. Additionally, don't beat yourself up for being an idiot. The entire iTunes ecosystem, designed to keep people from wholesale theft of music, and to protect the economic incentive for creating intellectual property, can be unbelievably frustrating and convoluted.

I have been using iTunes for years and have relied on it totally.

I am losing the faith with recent bugs - greyed out songs, missing artwork, ineligible songs, song no longer available etc.

OK, so most of the problems can be solved, but it all takes time. First you have to realise there is a problem, then search for a solution, then implement it. That takes time, and the historical attraction of Apple was that "it just works". That is no longer the case. Each update now means more time wasted on problem solving.

after following the instructions with consent of a senior advisor i am sad to report that this still has not resolved my issue. I am using iOS 10.0.2 and macos sierra, and more songs than I can count are still greeted out and cannot be played on my iPhone 6 S plus. Over 2 thousand songs have been synced with the cloud, I've turned off iCloud on my phone and then logged back and still same problem. Going to work with Apple again, any new info will be posted.