Music no longer syncing from iTunes to iPhone

Starting about a week ago, whenever I sync my iPhone to my iTunes, my new music/playlists from my iTunes are not syncing/updating to my iPhone.


I am not talking about Apple Music, I am talking about downloaded music I have stored on my PC; I like to have my music physically on my phone. I have a ton of music and I add/delete songs and update my playlists frequently. I have never had an issue syncing the updated music from my iTunes to my iPhone until now. When I do sync the phone, iTunes says it goes through the steps ... (preparing to sync, determining tracks to sync, waiting for changes to be applied etc) but nothing actually syncs.


Both my iTunes and iOS are up to date. I tried clicking the 'Reset Sync History' button in iTunes preferences, although I'm not sure it did anything.


Again, I've never had issues with syncing until the past week so I have no idea what could have changed.


Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this and how to fix it?

Posted on Nov 16, 2023 6:07 AM

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Posted on Nov 17, 2023 6:18 PM

Well, after searching all over this forum and other places on the internet, I found others with the same issue and 100 different answers. But one post I found (that also seemed to help a bunch of others) did the trick for me.


The things I tried...


  • I edited one song, like literally just added a word to the comments
  • I deleted one song from a playlist on my phone.
  • I deleted one song from my library in iTunes.


After I did these, I synced again and viola! it actually worked! I have no idea which of these 3 tiny changes I did fixed it, but this was much easier than some of the comments that suggested basically backing up the phone and making it like new and trying again...


I hope this helps anyone else who has this issue.



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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 17, 2023 6:18 PM in response to imj0257

Well, after searching all over this forum and other places on the internet, I found others with the same issue and 100 different answers. But one post I found (that also seemed to help a bunch of others) did the trick for me.


The things I tried...


  • I edited one song, like literally just added a word to the comments
  • I deleted one song from a playlist on my phone.
  • I deleted one song from my library in iTunes.


After I did these, I synced again and viola! it actually worked! I have no idea which of these 3 tiny changes I did fixed it, but this was much easier than some of the comments that suggested basically backing up the phone and making it like new and trying again...


I hope this helps anyone else who has this issue.



Dec 2, 2023 3:26 PM in response to imj0257

Well, the same issue came up again and this did not fix it the next time.


However, I did try something else that I think did fix it from then on. I noticed that whenever I tried to sync my phone, itunes would sometimes say that I did not have enough space on my phone. I disregarded it as a glitch because the amount of music on the playlist i sync is about 20gb, but I have over 50gb of free space on my phone. Weird. Either way, I removed a bunch of songs from the playlist and then synced it again and since then it has been working fine. I guess the number of songs or gb of data I want to sync was too much for itunes to handle. Since I reduced the size of data being synced, it has been working fine.

Mar 28, 2024 5:21 PM in response to imj0257

@imj0257: apologies if this is one of the 100 mentioned that did not work (for you), but i've just found that if, in the lefthand iphone music list in itunes, i uncheck a playlist, click apply, then re-check it and apply that, it will then sync the playlist. moreover, it seems to work with un/re-checking multiple playlists at a time, which is a relief as otherwise i would have to re-apply 101 playlists to my phone individually; --"tedious, very tedious". windows 10, iphone se 2 fwiw.

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Music no longer syncing from iTunes to iPhone

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