Transfering local files causes some to become greyed out

[somePerson2]

Plan

Premium

Country

United States of America

Device

iPhone 13 and 2023 m2 macbook pro

Operating System

ios 18 and macos 15.1

My Question or Issue

I transferred the local files from my iPhone to my Mac by copying the downloaded songs from my iPhone’s Spotify folder to my Mac’s local file folder. However, some of the songs are grayed out.

I’m not sure why this is happening because the songs are exactly the same and are supported file types (m4a and mp4). They also play on my iPhone and Windows PC, so it just gets even more confusing.

[Joan]

Hi there @somePerson2,

Thanks for reaching out.

Could you try removing the folder where the file is as a source, perform a clean reinstall of the app and then add the folder again? Hopefully this will allow the system to read all the files again and it should make it work as long as there aren't any issues with the files.

Hope this helps.

[somePerson2]

Thanks for responding, a large portion is still greyed out. This did help maybe 2 that I notice were previously greyed out become playable, but other than that nothing else changed.

Just to note all of these files are playable through other media players (like apple music) and that they are all just .mp4 files.

[OscarDC]

Hey @somePerson2,

Thank you for keeping in contact.

Keeping in mind that the format of the audio files you mentioned is MP4, would you mind changing the format of the affected songs to MP3 to see if it makes any difference? 

We'd also recommend re-downloading the tracks from a different legal source (on MP3 format as well) to see if the behavior persists.

Hope this helps. Let us know how it goes.