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

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.

Thanks for your suggestion. I ended up having to restore iphone but it worked. Wish i didnt have to but oh well.

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.

This worked for me just a couple of extra steps:

close itunes

unplug phone

restart itunes and plug your phone back in. It automatically started to sync entire library

Good luck

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 :-)

What fixed it for me:

1. On your computer, open iTunes > My iPhone (or whatever name you gave your iPhone) > "Music" page
2. Uncheck "Sync Music"
3. Click "Sync" button (bottom right)
4. Let it run and finish
5. Uncheck the box for every song, playlist, etc.
6. Click "Sync" button (bottom right) (This step may be unnecessary, but I did it and got the result I wanted.)
7. Let it run and finish
8. Check the boxes for the music you want on your iPhone
9. Click "Sync" button (bottom right)
10. Let it run and finish

See if that doesn't work for you. I tried a lot of things that did nothing, but this seems to have fixed it, and quickly.

It still doesnt work for me for all the solution given by all of u . None of it works . Even tried restore it a few times and use an Macbook Air . None of it copy the music .

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.

HAD SAME PROBLEM BUT FIXED IT!!!!!! try holding in sleep button up top and home button at the same time for around 6 or 7 seconds until the phone blacks out then start it again and then plug it into itunes again. worked for me

I noticed that only after rebooting both my pc and iPhone 4 that the sync would abort on one particular item, a ringtone. That ringtone also was a checked album on my iTunes music tab. I unchecked it, and all the other albums. But then the syncs just wouldn't finalize at the last stage. It didn't abort while a song was downloading. Checking and unchecking Sync Music didn't work either. Then making sure I had only my playlists checked, I did a restore. That worked. Not sure if unchecking the albums was necessary,

plug, airplane mode, sync

I have the same problem, only some music can sync to my iPhone, but it can sync to my iPod from the same iTunes library.

OK, here is what I found worked, and you may not have to RESTORE.

#1 Turn to Airplane Mode

#2 Make sure you have the Update to the newest iOS, then uncheck all music.

#3 Back up your phone (You should anyway)

#4 Click on the music you want to Sync

#5 Sync

Music should start to copy over..

After hrs of trying different things this seemed to do the trick

I have a iPhone 4S

Cheers