Ipod songs 'grayed out' in Itunes and won't play

My son's Ipod will not allow him to drag any playlists into his Ipod(nano) anymore. we get the circle with the line througt it and it doesn't load. also, when i Itunes we click on his Ipod and all the songs appear on the screen but they're all grayed out and he can't click them to play them. this all started a couple days ago. I updated the Itunes and his Ipod last night but that didn't fix the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
al

Grey text when you look at the content and lock symbol at the bottom of the screen simply shows that your iPod is set to automatically update. If you want to access your iPod directly, drag songs to it, play it through your iTunes, connect it to a second computer etc. you just need to change the update method to "Manually manage songs and videos" in the iPod Summary tab and click Apply. The text will change from grey to dark and the padlock will disappear: Managing content manually on iPod
One thing to be aware of with manually updating is that the iPod also has to be manually ejected before the "Do Not Disconnect" message will go away. Safely disconnect iPod

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Sounds like your iPod is in auto-sync mode, which greys out the contents and won't let you change things. That's normal since you're expected to make such changes to your iTunes library and re-sync your iPod to capture the changes.
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Ipod songs 'grayed out' in Itunes and won't play

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