My music won't sync to my iPhone 4S after updating to 11.1

Ok, I spent the evening on the phone with someone from Apple and we figured mine out. It's probably not the same reason why everyone else couldn't sync.

The reason I couldn't sync was because I had just changed my apple ID email address and there were some complications with it. Basically, it was like my iTunes thought my iphone was stolen and that's why it wouldn't let me finish syncing. He was very helpful though and we were able to fix the problem.

If you haven't changed your ID then there's another reason why it's happening. I just called 1-800-MYAPPLE and waited about 5-10 minutes to speak to someone and it worked out. So, if all else fails I'd just call that number and they can help you fix it. Hope this helps!

I was having the same issues everyone else is having; iphone 5 running iOS7, iTunes 11.1. Everything seemed to work fine the other day, but today iTunes hasn't recognized my iPhone 5 at all. After restarting my Mac and iPhone, still no luck. BUT, I found something that did fix the problem!!!

I disconnected my iPhone from my Mac. I grabbed my iPod Classic (newest generation). I plugged it into the computer and iTunes recognized it and began syncing. While it was syncing, I then plugged in my iPhone also and it recgonized "2 devices". I clicked on the tab that said 2 devices and sure enough, there was my iPhone. I clicked it and began to sync it as well. Problem solved. I hope this helps someone!

*UPDATE* After syncing iPod Classic and iPhone 5, I ejected my iPod, then I ejected my iPhone. Then I reconnected the cable from my Mac to my iPhone and it recognized it without the iPod being connected as well.

I hope this info helps, I had the same issue with my brand new iphone. anyway,from your phone, go to settings then go to icloud and turn it off. you now can sync your music. turn on the icloud on after sync or not its up to you.

I was having the exact same problem: the barber's shop pole from ****. . .

Restored, Restarted, etc.. . .no luck.

(the sync symbol would keep rolling on the iphone even when itunes was closed, and it wasn't even connected to the computer. all wi fi sync options were off (those have always been a black pit of hang for me)).

Then i tried turning off all wi fi, bluetooth, etc. entirely.

That seemed to work.. ...

For some reason it went into "copying x of 1825" (maybe because of the restore?)

which was a little weird because most of my stuff was already on it. I originally was just trying to sync in a couple of new songs, and after the restore, everything showed up except for those new songs. the problem was that it would hang whenever i tried to sync it.

but it did copy all that stuff: no more hellish barber's pole.

sync worked.

turned back on all the wi fi and stuff, and did a dry sync.

which also worked, so. . ..

maybe ok now.

I'm having the exact same problem! I thought it was down to the iOs7 update but now I'm not sure if it the the Itunes 11.1 update...nothing seems to be working for me either! I'm going to try and do it artist by artist but at the moment its not even doing 1 song let alone all of the music

I had the same problem. iTunes said it was unable to sync because it was in my lock screen which is password protected. I had to unlock my phone before being able to sync. I never had to do that before iTunes 11.1. Check and see if thats the problem.

Here's how I fixed it. I ended up calling Apple support and after exhausting the easy quick fixes I ended up having to do a full restore on my phone and then a backup restore.

All in all this took about 30 minutes and now my phone works perfectly. Their suggestion was that I got a bad download either because of the volume of downloaded traffic or a poor connection.

Either way if you can't figure it out try the system restore.

It happened again. Will try (yet another) restore.

For the record, I noticed this time that the itunes' playlists and the iphone's playlists aren't matching up:

The iphone doesn't show the most recently added playlists, no mater how many times i turn off and reconnect either of them.

In addition, the iphones' two rotating "sync" arrow icons continue to rotate, even after canceling the sync in itunes, quitting itunes, and disconnecting the iphone.

Have just installed the newest update (ios 7.0.2), but the problem still persists.

I had problems with syncing 5000+ songs with embedded playlists (eg syncing a playlist dependent on a selection of another playlist). The symptoms were it got to a number synced, then just exitted sync. When I looked on the iphone a large number of songs were not synced but were listed with a red circle with a blocked red square inside.

I tried all sorts of things eg resetting the iphone, resyncing, syncing wi-fi on/off, different USB port, different cable etc. Spent hours waiting for sync to then fail. Spent hours on the phone to Apple support.

Eventually, PicoMor's suggestion of turning on Flight Mode fixed it. This is what I did:

I set Flight Mode on. I selected to sync nothing (ie so this cleared my iphone of all songs and books - I don't sync anything else). I then selected the playlists I wanted (which all select from other playlists not synced). I automatically synced (I did not manually manage). It took some hours to sync everything. But it did. I turned flight mode off; and then the 444 purchases from itunes also became available to download if I wished on my phone; and I have added albums / removed some songs (just like I normally would), and have experienced no problems.

I would conclude that the 444 purchases from iTunes were somehow conflicting with what I was uploading from my computer. Why/how I am not sure. The only cautionary point I have is at the end of sync it says "cancelling synchronisation" on iTunes; but it never finishes (or starts?) cancelling. Disconnecting iPhone/ closing iTunes stops the cancelling.

Windows 7/Itunes 11 Fully patched.

IoS 7.02/iPhone 4S

Kudos to PicoMor for having the fortitude to do that! (ugh).

RE: fscarcelli

(the second time my iPhone tanked)

Six restores later. . . . . . . .and I finally got it back (phew).

I really have no idea, but. . .

Here is my best recollection of what I did on the restore that worked (the sixth one).

Most of this stuff is probably just voodoo superstition.

On the iPhone:

Turn off all wifi on the iPhone:

Put it in airplane mode. (Settings/Airplane Mode)

Turn off "Find My iPhone" (Settings/iCloud/Find My iPhone)

Turn off iCloud backup on the Phone (Settings/iCloud/Storage and Backup/iCloud Backup)

Now plug the iPhone into the computer and bring up the "Summary" menu.

In the "Options" box of the "Summary" screen:

Deselect:

"Automatically sync when. . . . "

"Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi"

"Manually manage. . ."

Select:

"Sync only checked. . . "

In the "Backups" box of the "Summary" screen:

Choose "Automatically Back Up" : "This computer" (in other words, NOT "iCloud")

in the "iPhone" box of the "Summary" screen:

Choose "Restore iPhone"

(Do NOT choose "Restore Backup..." in the "Backups" box.)

Go through the lengthy Restore process. . . . .

Once the iPhone is restored as a completely new phone, repeat all the steps given above in: "Turn off all wifi on iPhone" and "In the 'Backups' box of the "Summary" screen".

Then, click through the sync tabs ("Apps", "Music", "Movies" etc.) and deselect everything.

(In other words, put NOTHING on the "brand new" iPhone)

Hit "Sync", and see if it runs completely through a cycle without hanging.

(During the sync process, allow the iPhone to continue at least 5-10 minutes past the point that you believe it to be hung (the dreaded barber pole). ANY change in status in the upper iTunes window box may indicate that the sync is still progressing)

After the (hopefully successful) "dry" sync:

in iTunes, bring up the "Summary" screen.

Now, from the "Backups" box of the "Summary" screen, choose "Restore Backup...".

This brings up the window that says "Choose a backup to restore. .. . .".

Do NOT hit the "Restore" button.

First, click on the up down arrows on the menu "iPhone Name:", and choose a backup that predates when you started having problems. For instance, if you started having problems on Sept. 21, and you see a Sept. 20, choose that one.

If you do not see a backup that predates your problems, you can try another one, but that is the one that I finally got to work. Make sure that the restore is from the computer, not iCloud, and any wi-fi stuff you can find is turned off (see above).

Hit "Restore".

During the restore process, allow the iPhone to continue at least 5-15 minutes past the point that you believe it to be hung (the dreaded barber pole). ANY change in status in the upper iTunes window box may indicate that the sync is still progressing). My successful restore process took over an hour, and had many points where it seemed possibly hung on the barber pole. However, a good sign is if you see a "copying 1 out of (whatever)" status at the top of the iTunes window. Do not do anything else with the computer or the iPhone while it is in this process.

And finally, here is my "voodoo logic" analysis:

The barber pole gives little information as to _where_ in the process it is.

If the process is long and slow for some reason (like maybe a choked wifi connection, or too large of a data clump being squeezed over the wifi), it is very difficult to distinguish this from being hung.

Unless you have a really fast wifi connection, the cloud can send you down a virtual black hole if it is trying to download many gigs of information. I have about 43 gigs on my phone, so a restore through my wifi would take hours if not days. This happened on at least one of my restore attempts. It also seemed possibly to be happening on other attempts, even when i was trying to restore only through the computer. (sometimes itunes would show only the barber poll for many minutes, or stop completely, while the spinning two arrow "sync" icon on the iphone would continue to spin.)

(This is also why i never allow my phone to do even a normal (small) sync on wifi: it takes forever.)

Once the phone developed a problem (the initial hang while doing even a "dry" [i.e. nothing changing] sync) it seemed to be very difficult to get a workable backup, possibly (?) because the problem tended to get saved into the latest backups before I noticed it, and then would be restored with it.

The backup that I finally got to functionally work was the earliest one saved on my computer, which was the only one that predated any of these problems. It still took about an hour and a half, but at least it gave me a status bar in itunes ("1 of 1785" etc.) to let me know that progress was slowly being made, instead of just a barber pole.

For a phone with many gigs of stuff, it seemed(?) as if the icloud backups did not work as well as backups from the local computer.

(However, if the local computer's hard drive were to crash, the cloud could be of course an utter life saver.)

Turning off iCloud Backup and wifi, bluetooth helped me to get my music synced to my iPhone 4S. Since I did both, not sure if just one would work but it is much faster than doing a restore and backup that the Apple support reps seem to resort to every time. Good luck everyone.

I had the same problem. Turns out it was my fault. I fixed it as follows:

Go to your Muscic Library

Verify that the "check" box is checked for all items you want synced

Go back to your phone page and sync

If you don't have these boxes checked in your Itunes Library, your phone won't sync them no matter what you do.

This is probably a common mistake for Windows Users (like me) that now have I Phones and miss this critical detail. Windows does not have anything comparable to the ITunes "check box" so us PC users don't think to check something so simple.

Hope that helps someone else because it had me mystified for a long time.

Hi anorton, after 4 weeks of trying everything I now have my ipod full of songs! Thanks for the advice. I still can't sync podcasts - get a playback error unless I download them one by one straight onto my iPod - so I gave up on Apple's app and now use iCatcher which is better anyways :-)

i am having the same issue "waiting for changes too be applied" ive tried all the stuff on here, nothing is working, i got 6500 songs all messed up in my iphone because of this ! Figure it out Apple i pay good money for this sh*t!

I have the same issue with my 5th generation gb ipod touch. Nothing works, I waste so much time and sleep syncing my ipod. I never had such a crappy device. I wish apple could refund my money or compensate me for all my lost time. It's rediculous.