Ulzurrun de Asanza i Sàez

Month: January 2016

Fixing greyed out songs on iTunes Library

I use iTunes as my main media player and I’m user of iTunes Match since the service was available to Spanish users. It’s a service I really like but recently I’ve experienced an estrange issue: some songs appeared greyed out (even complete albums). I could download them and play them individually but when playing a playlist or album with greyed out songs, iTunes completely skipped them.

Today, thanks to iMore forums, I discovered how to fix this issue.  You have to list all your songs, this can be done following these steps:

  1. Select Music tab on iTunes’ leftmost button bar.
  2. Choose either My Music or Playlists in the middle tab bar.
  3. Open Sort popup by clicking rightmost button in the bar you’ve been interacting with.
  4. Finally, in the dropdown, choose Songs.

You’ll notice that the first column with header has no clear title but a simple check icon. You can customise all the columns but this one, which is always displayed regardless your settings. Checked songs will be playable and unchecked ones won’t. I don’t know why some of my songs where checked and others unchecked neither what really means that a song is checked or not but checking all my songs fixed the issue so, finally, to fix the greyed out issue:

  1. Select all your songs.
  2. Control-click any of them.
  3. On the displayed menu click on Check selection.

Introducing Trakt.tv Browser

I got a 4th gen Apple TV Developer Kit last year in September but I was working full time on Caff and although I wanted to play with it I couldn’t wrote a single app for it before Christmas. Nevertheless I used it for a couple of months, mainly to play media content streamed from my NAS and I missed a way to add movies and TV show to my Trakt.tv watchlist directly from my Apple TV (there are a couple of ‐pretty good‐ media players which sync with Trakt.tv, but none of them allows you to add content to your watchlist).

So I wrote Trakt.tv Browser an extremely simple App that just does it: you can search movies and TV shows and add or remove them from your watchlist. I plan to update it with more features as I use it and find that they are useful but it is a hobby App for the moment so it will take me some time to publish any update.

Let me know any feature you’d like to see in a future update in the comments.