Apple Devices on Windows 10 crashes while Syncing Music on to iPhone

I had the same problem and tried this. I can second this solution, it worked fine when both the phone and the Windows laptop were not connected to the Wifi. I am on Windows 11, so it is an issue for any Windows device no matter the version.

Kinda annoying that you have to turn off the Wifi for it to work but at least there is a solution. Also make sure to restart the application after you switch off the Wifi, otherwise it will be bugged.

Thanks for the advice!!

Just came here to say that I experienced this exact problem today on Windows 11 with my iPhone 15 Pro. I newly installed the Apple Devices application and it would close mid-sync with no pop-up warning or any crash code.

I tried putting my PC and phone to airplane mode but the application still crashed. I then restarted both devices (as I had not restarted the PC since installing Apple Devices), put them on airplane mode and the sync got much closer to completing, but I decided to use Firefox for a moment and the application crashed again. I'm fairly certain therefore it's some sort of issue with the Apple Devices application that's perhaps linked to the user doing other activities during the sync. I re-opened Apple Devices and started the sync again and it completed successfully without me touching the PC or doing any other activity on it.

I don't sync very often but I do hope that this issue is investigated and fixed by Apple quickly.

I have the same issue. However, when I put my Windows 10 and iPhone in flight mode during sync, it didn't crash. I guess it some internet communication going on during sync that makes the Apple Devices crash. Hope it helps.

Hello!

I tried to transfer around 2.7k songs in my library and Apple Music just doesn’t work. Always crashes at different moments.

To fix this I just downloaded an old version of iTunes (I think that is 12.13.2.3). You can find the file by just searching it in Google.

By using this version of iTunes, I finally managed to transfer all my music.

Just a quick update to say that after nearly four months of struggling with Apple Music for PC, I have finally given up and gone back to the most recent version of iTunes. I remain a satisfied Apple Music user with my iPhone, iPod, and Sonos devices, but for everything that I hold most important in a digital music management environment (i.e., I'm never going to replace my Windows PC with a MAC), iTunes works the way I need it to. It gives me no crashes, no sync problems, and zero frustration.

The only thing I gave up by rolling back to iTunes PC is that I no longer have the ability to stream lossless content from Apple on the audio system to which my PC is connected. If I want to do that I have to go into another room and listen on my Sonos system. I can live with that!

I synced each playlist individually instead of syncing all the songs in one go as that was another alternative route at the moment

I was able to sync my whole library through restarting the sync 5-6 times (somewhat about 3k songs to sync).

It is extremely regrettable that Apple seems to have little interest in delivering at least usable software for Windows. In their current state, the new programs are worse than iTunes, which had a lot of room for improvement, especially in terms of UX.

Screw Apple Music/Devices/TV - they are shoddy at best as far as "working" properly and missing basic functions that iTunes had built-in from the beginning of iTunes. I really miss the "CoverFlow" view that they axed. Copyright blah blah... anyway, here is what I did to get iTunes back with all of my library, playlists, album artwork intact and functioning like the good-ol' iTunes we have grown to love(?).

1) created a restore point twice with two unique different names (probably not necessary - one is probably enough)

2) uninstalled Apple "Music", "Devices" (I didn't have TV installed)

3) rebooted/restarted Windows

4) **Not sure if this is necessary - but I did a Windows disk cleanup and rebooted again

5) Downloaded and installed the latest iTunes (version 12.13.2.3) (which is still available for download and was just updated today).

6) iTunes pulled all of my music/audio/album(s) tracks and playlists back in (including album art, mp3tags, etc.) and were available and working just like it did before Apple Music infected my system.

There was only one album that it couldn't find the tracks to, which was a recent purchase I made on Apple/iTunes store - easy fix, just selected "Locate tracks" when it couldn't find the first track of the album. Everything else was available and working properly. Haven't tried syncing my phone yet - that may be another dilemma to deal with. Wish me luck!

I continue to have issues with either my iPod Touch or my iPhone SE (right now Windows 10 likes my phone better than the iPod). The only way I have successfully completed a sync is to keep the size relatively small (6-10 GB of data) and be prepared to restart the sync process multiple times. Yesterday it took Apple Devices 4 attempts to complete syncing about 370 songs.

If this is happening with Windows 11 users as well (I had held out hope that it was just us 10 holdouts that were dealing with this problem), then Apple needs to own their products & services and make them work properly. For everyone that pays for them, not just Mac users.

I’m not sure, but based on the comments I’ve read on this board I think I’ve managed to solve my instance of this problem. I have around 14k songs in what used to be my iTunes library, and was having a problem whereby the Apple Devices app would crash when during a long sync. I was also finding that the app would insist that I needed to update my installation of iOS on my brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though the phone was reporting that as being the installed version.

So, after much trial and error I’ve got the problem resolved. I followed these steps:

1. Let Apple Devices download and install the latest version of iOS onto my phone. Although there was no need to do this, it appears to have reset the flag on the app and it’s no longer insisting on doing it;
2. Switched off the WiFi on my desktop PC (which is where Devices is installed) and made the LAN the only connection to both my router and my NAS box (which hosts both the library file and the audio library itself);
3. Put the iPhone into Flight Mode;

I then ran a test sync using a small number of playlists, which comprised about 1,000 songs. The sync process completed gracefully AND Devices didn’t crash at the end of it. I ran a number of other syncs until all of my playlists (regular AND smart) had been synced.

Once I’ve discharged my battery a decent amount, I’m going to go for a full library sync. I’ll report back afterwards.

I am having the same problem with Apple Devices not identifying the actual IOS on my iPhone (like poster Cfoster 3448 Apple Devices tells me I need to update to 17.4.1 when my phone says that's what it is running).

I was finally able to successfully sync a playlist to both my iPhone and my iPod Touch by paring the playlist down to about 10GB of audio. I should be thankful...at least now Apple Devices finishes the job it starts.

It is evident over the course of the last few weeks that Apple is, in its own way, trying to tweak Apple Music for Windows to make it perform more like iTunes. For example, when I first converted over from iTunes, to import audio files into my library, I had to select each file for import; a few days ago I noticed that I now have the option to add a folder. That's an improvement - thank you. I also appreciate (and this is huge for me) the ability to stream lossless audio on my Windows PC from Apple Music that until recently I could only do on my Apple device.

A welcome improvement would be for Apple Music to include a function to play/extract audio from audio CDs. iTunes could do it; Apple Music cannot. Along with that is the iTunes ability to convert homemade audio files into AAC or ALAC has disappeared.

Another thing that iTunes did well that Apple Music does not at all is display libraries like spreadsheets. This made tag editing very easy, and also made it easy for a user to see if an error had been made in library management, because iTunes could display album and track counts in ways that Apple Music doesn't. In Apple Music, I have yet to find a way to see how many albums I have in my library. I know I can see how many albums are tagged with either the same genre or artist, but neither of those are practical options for the whole library (especially for us geezers who have large libraries).

Long story short, with iTunes, I had a tool that, for library management purposes, was nearly self-sufficient. Without iTunes I have to use three other applications to do efficiently .

[Edited by Moderator]

I doubt that wiping/reinstalling would help.

I have brand new iPhone. I was on Android before, so my PC doesn't have any legacy Apple software on it - I have installed Apple Devices and Music right away. With Android, music was copied from File Explorer, I did not need any syncing software. Nothing relevant was working on PC at the time, even AV is the most basic Windows Defender. A lot of storage and memory available on PC.

Long story short, around 3,000 songs have copied in 5-6 attempts. Apple Devices crashing without any error message, I have noticed that songs simply stop copying over, and a second or two later, app closes.

Unlike Apple Music which worked really nice in creating playlists, Apple Devices appear to be quite buggy. Hopefully, Apple will invest some resources to patch it. I do understand that they are more interested in integration of their devices, but, reality is that more iPhone customers are on Windows PC, rather than Mac.

I have a windows 11 computer and up until like a month ago was using itunes, for some reason was recommended to download apple music, but cant sync with it, so went back to itunes, and wont sync, so went back to apple music and you must use apple devices. I was syncing my phone for the first time, it stopped and exited out, had to restart like 10 or more times to complete the sync, i have 3500 songs. It was time consuming, and two days later i had to fix a problem from the original sync, so had to do again. I tried again, with the apple devices and again stopped after 200 songs. I choose to make sure device was in reset mode, and synced with my mac pc instead, and will continue to use it. After the first sync with the apple devices my windows pc would not start so thought it was a computer issue. Eventually quite a few hours later the windows computer began to

come on again. Reading the comments here i see it is likely the apple devices.

There is nothing in the settings that looks like this will fix the problem. My thoughts are if you can still use itunes with out issues not to switch on windows especially if only have a windows computer, if going to stop and start while syncing continuously without error message.

Just a quick update on my end; I have slowly and painfully chipped away at my 18,300 songs, and am currently at about 2200 left to go. I had a day where I was doing a lot of relatively mindless tasks at my desk, so I called in a support case while I was repetitively launching sync attempts, and have progressed on the case to where I will be speaking with an engineer tomorrow as the support manager saw what was happening and escalated it accordingly.

It was literally dozens of sync attempts yesterday, with my best/most productive getting something like 1150 songs synced, and the mean was around 200 songs at a time. You can do the math, I'm just tired of it. :-s

Basically, it seems to time out/reach some sort of data transfer limit and just completely hiccups out of the application. No error message, no status code, and Apple Devices is no longer visible or traceable on my PC.

Anyway, if any random Apple engineers are checking in on this, it is not a setup issue, it is not a network issue, it is a bug. You should probably try to fix it. (And thanks to the support staff who moved my request fairly painlessly and quickly through their requisite layers of checks and balances.)