iTunes won't sync my music, movies, ringtones... Anything!

Hi Yoshi,

Had a similar issue with Music, where iTunes completed to 'Sync', but when looking at 'On my iPhone -> Music' it was empty. For me the problem was the music library:

I pasted music files from an old laptop and haven't 'Played' them since. When I tried listening to an album via iTunes it popped up a message saying 'iTunes cannot locate the file [song name]. Do you wish to locate manually or cancel?' Once you point (locate) iTunes to the location of your music library (on your PC), it will automatically update all missing files - and you'll be able to sync your iPhone.

Hope it helps.

Dvir.

PaintingFlowers helped me fix it. Thank you!

Yes Yes Yes 😉

Thank you aerohunter !

I tried everything in vain until I found your tip : "Set it up as a new phone"

It did work perfectly !

thx again

.: Thank you, aerohunter, for your suggestion. I tried it (while quietly panicking!) and it worked. The key is to follow exactly what you described:

1) back up your phone first

2) restore as a new phone

3) THEN restore from the backup.

The key? BE PATIENT! I freaked out when it restored from the backup, because it looked like I wasn't getting all of my apps back. However, it takes time for each app to be restored, and once that is completed, all apps were in their exact locations as before.

Then my music synched up, and all the grayed out songs were restored as well.

Thank you!

I actually had this issue too. I would check and uncheck files to add to my iPhone and iTunes would show me via the colored memory bar that my changes would affect my memory in a corresponding way (with more BLUE audio or PURPLE video). When I then clicked "sync" the memory bar would then show that almost no BLUE or PURPLE (audio & video) were on my iPhone.

The problem was all of my files were connected to an external drive and the drive was a little finicky. Sometimes it wouldn't boot up with the computer. Because of this my iTunes needed to re-connect all the files.

If you move your files this may be the issue as well.

The fix is to click on any of the files you can't transfer to your phone on iTunes. If this is the issue then it will not be able to locate the file. Simply navigate on your computer to locate the file and "open." You will then be prompted to use this to "find all missing files." Do this, it can take a while, then when it's finished try syncing your iPhone.

Now that iTunes knows where the files are, it can move them to the iPhone.

I hope this helps.

While not exactly the same, I was having a similar problem with my wife's iPad mini. She was complaining that a playlist she normally listened to was suddenly missing a bunch of songs. I kept re-syncing but no matter what I tried I kept getting the same subset of songs for her playlist.

Eventually I realized that a restriction had been recently set on the iPad to exclude any music/video content marked as "Explicit", which was done so that our young kids wouldn't be listening to inappropriate music. It was the songs marked Explicit that were not being synced. Once I removed that restriction (Settings>General>Restrictions>Music & Podcasts under Allowed Content) all was back to normal.

The suggestion by Eighty87 worked for me - delete the entire iTunes library, sync the iPhone, repopulate the iTunes library (search for media....), sync the iPhone again with the selected songs/artists I want on the phone. The only problem with this method is that it deleted all the custom playlists I had created...oh well...

THANK YOU! This worked. ^^

OH MY GOD THANK YOU!!!

I was getting so cray cray...my sister thought it was hilarious until I snapped at her.

@~@

Seriously though, this was driving me INSANE.

When you say "delete the entire iTune library" do you mean the Apple encoding files that iTunes creates when you load music from CD's & mp3's?

I have to delete 16,000+ songs???? Really?

How will I get the songs back? I only keep about 600-700 songs on my iPhone 5. I have about 14,500 songs on my iPod, but I'm scared to sync that and loose most of what I have on the iPod.

.......and when is this new firmware coming out to alleviate the battery issue? (I hate to have to switch to the Android platform......especially since I've been using the iPhone from the first gen until now)

Deleting the iTunes library (within the iTunes application!) doesn't erase the songs from your hard drive, it just deletes the "links" to the songs in iTunes. I suspect those links can get corrupted. If you have any doubts, you could back up all the songs on a flash drive or external drive before messing with iTunes...which is probably a good idea anyway. After deleting the iTunes library, you can recreate it by having iTunes look for all the songs stored on your computer (i.e., "search for media"). Hope that helps.

If the links are corrupted.....then I shouldn't be able to play those songs. All of the songs that are dithered (with the 'O' next to them) on my iPhone that I can not play on the phone will play in iTunes.

I have begun to back up and rearrange my music folders.......I found out I have about 26,000+ songs (I found several zipped folders which is not included in that figure). It's gonna take me days/weeks to reset all of those songs back into iTunes and reset the playlists.

I agree - it doesn't make sense - seems like you should be able to sync any songs that can be played in iTunes. But for whatever reason, I couldn't sync certain songs to the iPhone until I wiped out and rebuilt my iTunes library. It shouldn't take that long for iTunes to find all the songs on your hard drive to rebuild the library. Unfortunately it could take a long time to recreate custom playlists....

Yeah......well I rearranged my music files (which I keep on a 1TB external HD) & I think I'm gonna move my desk so I'll have to disconnect the HD from the Mac........I hope the search for music files feature works otherwise it'll take a very long time to import all of the music files the Mac said it found. (It stated 52,469 items in my music files). I would figure 1000-2000 of those are jpg that I use for album art.

I hope I get done before NFL football tomorrow. LOL

I guess I can shop for Windows 8 machines while iTunes does its thing.

I have had a rotten time trying to get this thing to work too, just basic things like syncing my music library. After so much anticipation on a very expensive and "fancy" item I would hope the simple things would just work!

So frustrated after hours wasted on this problem, that doesn't sound like a new issue according to the other posts. Why doesn't Apple fix this already??