If you use iTunes Match or iCloud Music Library, you may see a lot of music that is dimmed and marked as “Waiting” or “No Longer Available.”
When music is marked “Waiting,” it hasn’t yet synced with iCloud Music Library. I discuss the problem of permanently Waiting tracks in this article; in some cases, tracks are always Waiting, and never actually sync to the cloud. Sometimes these can be orphaned tracks; songs that may have been in your library at one time, but are no longer there. And in some cases, I’m seeing tracks that I recently added to My Music from Apple Music that never actually got recorded as being in my library.
And when it is “No Longer Available,” the record label has pulled the music from Apple Music. This may be because an entire album (or even all of a label’s music) has been removed, or it may just be that certain tracks of an album were pulled. I’ve been browsing Apple Music a lot recently, adding a great deal of music to my iTunes library, and finding a surprising number of albums or songs that, just a couple of days later, are No Longer Available.
You may want to see all the music in your library that is either Waiting and/or No Longer Available. You can’t make a smart playlist to find music whose iCloud Status is Waiting or No Longer Available, but you can make a smart playlist that will exclude every other iCloud Status, as follows.
You can then sort through these tracks, deleting those that are No Longer Available, and checking on the Waiting tracks to see if you have local copies, or if they are truly lost.