Why is my music grayed out after upgrading to iOS 18.2?

Interesting suggestion. That actually brought back more music. Very odd. It's not even by album. If I have an album that has 12 songs on it, 6 will be playable and the rest are grayed out. And one song that was playable before with the initial sync before I wiped all the music off is now grayed out. Makes me think that the Apple rep didn't know what she was talking about. Music that was in my country before cannot be out of my country now and vice versa. Sounds like this system is full of bugs.

I was going to try this (and I will later), but when I plugged in my phone, iTunes started synching again. The first time, I had roughly 1500 tracks to sync. It ran through all of them, one by one, but really only 200 or so actually loaded to the phone and were playable. The rest were grayed out. This time, it gathered about 1300 or so tracks and ran through them all, again, one by one, but it really only synced about 200 or so. I could see them pop one one by one on my phone while the sync was in progress. Another sync left me at about 1100, another left me at 850 or so, and then a final sync took care of the rest. So multiple syncs had to be done to get everything to load. I read online that turning off icloud music would stop the 200 barrier, but I could not find anywhere on my phone or itunes to turn that off. The options aren't there. One thread on reddit suggested deleting all music =and= the music app, and then reinstalling the app. That helped a couple folks, but strangely, my last sync took care of the remaining 850, so I don't think I have the 200 barrier issue. Maybe there's some weird issue if the count is over 1,000. Anyway, I think Apple has messed up iTunes and/or the last iOS in some way. There's no reason why I should have to do iterative syncing to get everything to load. How frustrating.

And I will say it again, that the Apple Support Rep, as sincere and apologetic as she was, telling me that I had to rerip my entire CD collection, was really a know-nothing. She really had no idea what she was talking about - which is sad, because you're calling who you think are the experts, and they really aren't.

Picas, thank you, thank you for the suggestions. If it weren't for you, I would never have noticed that something odd was going on with the random syncing and tried the brute force method!