Catalina - iPhone sync issues

I have to agree here. And it does seem like all of the negative things that happened with the new updates and replacing iTunes with "Music" have fell upon the music people own. Which in my case, is so substantial that I have little or no interest in Apple Music.

I agree with the above and my library is about 45,000 songs in size. My quick solution was to instal Window 10 with Bootcamp and a copy of iTunes for Windows and moved my library to an external drive and now it works flawlessly as before.

but this too can be short lived and I’m currently looking into alternatives and possibly move away from Apple altogether.

Like everyone here I was unable to sync my music from Mac to iphone X with Catalina. After too much time spent searching for solutions, I found something that worked, and now it syncs quickly and easily (I don't quite believe it'll work next time I try it, but I try to be hopeful). Why these settings are hidden and why they don't tell you this is still quite frustrating. But, I went to settings, then privacy, then "Media & Apple Music" and there are two apps listed that in some way use the music app and interfered with the syncing. One was Chord Tracker, and when I toggled them both to off, then the sync worked. So I'll just have to go in to these settings and turn on the apps when I want to use them. I've no idea if this will work for any of you and the whole thing is pretty frustrating and buggy, it seems, but hopefully this might help someone.

Catalina crashes my system almost every night and it forces my iMac to restart.

Trying to sync two movies to the new Apple TV system and it´s taken 8 hours and not done yet...

This is the worst upgrade I´ve ever done from Apple.

Seriously considering backing everything up and restoring Sierra.

Hi all, I had the same issue: iPhone X with the most recent iOS and iMac with Catalina not syncing for a while.

Today I checked what Activity Monitor would disclose. There is a process called AMPdevicesAgent reacting when I push the Sync button in the finder window.

So my conclusion: kill all "AMP…" processes and try again. In my setup this worked, everything with sync now does, what I want it to do. So for me this did the trick.

Try it, best Max

PS It took several sync steps to sync every part, specially the photos took time. After some time, none of the recent photos appeared. Then I did restart the iPhone, plugged it in via USB cable, unplugged it again … then it took on to sync properly.

Now the iPhone goes into connection with the iMac when in the same WIFI network. The sync starts also with the iPhone asleep.

For me, this worked well.

Hi All,

I too am dissapointed with Apple's software these days. I wished I had never upgraded to Catalina. I miss all of my *very* useful 32 bit applications.

That said, I have found two issues that have what seems to be a simple solution.

(1) If you cannot get either photos or music to sync with your iPhone (I have three a 5, 6, and X), disconnect your phone. Halt and then restart the Music application, and then it ought to work. You do it from the Music app, but the files can be seen syncing in the Finder window for your device.

(2) We share files here, specifically the music collection for the house. Often "Shared" Files stops working. The solution is to go to "System Preferences" and click file sharing off, and then click it back on again.

Looks like the new privacy code that's been woven into the kernel has *lots* of bugs, so for now, stop and restart Music or File Sharing to get them to work properly, (for a while, until some pointer gets lost again). Ugh.

it appears that it is all working again along with a status bar.

This is still an EPIC FAIL by Apple, 4 updates and countless months later to fix a fundamental Base function is unforgivable.

I don’t even know how many wasted hours I spent trying to sync 23,000 songs 18,000 photos to 2 iPhones and 2 iPads. The iPod classic 7th gen shows up but still does nothing.

I spent time setting up boot camp with Windows 10, moving my libraries to an external drive formatted to work on both platforms and strangely everything is working On Windows 10 with iTunes including the iPod classic.

Catalina is creating a big problem for itunes;

what planet are the apple engineers on.... this problem has existed for weeks.

i still cannot sync properly to move my music from itunes to my iphone.

using customer service has also not be any help.... the only response i got was that only music purchased from the apple store will sync over.....

well.... what about music i legalyl purchase with a CD and put that into itunes.

Apple... wake up and fix this problem.

Hi all, I had the same issue: iPhone X with the most recent iOS and iMac with Catalina not syncing for a while.

Today I checked what Activity Monitor would disclose. There is a process called AMPdevicesAgent reacting when I push the Sync button in the finder window.

So my conclusion: kill all "AMP…" processes and try again. In my setup this worked, everything with sync now does, what I want it to do. So for me this did the trick.

After that it took several sync steps to get all synced, but now it seems to work.

I thought this latest update held promise, but I too still have problems with duplicate photos. The syncing feature goes through a process of removing a bunch of photos off my phone before trying to put them back on, and then some. This then results in duplicates.

And I have worked with Apple support on this, they have seen/monitored it happening on my iMac/iPhone

Same here. Finder syncs Photos to iOS the first time OK, and then after that I get duplicates and missing photos. Some photos appear as gray squares. I'm on the latest release 10.15.4 / 13.4.0 as well...

Yeah, I spoke too soon. Sync went fine and fairly quickly but have some duplicates plus the photo also shows are not sorted by name on the iPad but is on the iPhone. Impossible to find the folder I want which starts with the date.

Last week I synced my phone, after removing all photos in the manner I've been forced to sync since the Catalina upgrade. This sync was successful in that it imported all photos and movies with no duplication. Today I attempted to sync new photos twice without removing the photos. The first time it actually removed about 30 photos and also some videos but it did not add any of the new photos I was syncing. The second time it removed about three thousand photos and some videos. It failed to sync by not adding the new photos. My workaround is to remove all photos and then sync again.

It's turned to garbage, no question - they don't care, they want to sell watch straps. I have two iPhones, I updated one and all my music disappeared and on the other on no matter how many times I try to sync from my Mac, the wheel spins for 3 seconds then it stops and it's done nothing. If I look at the same folder on my Mac (Music) and the phone, there is 34 songs on one and 150 on the other - it just won't sync them the same and it no longer adds playlists created on the Mac, onto the phone - total waste of time.