Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

Been following this thread almost from the start, and tried most of the solutions short of wiping the phone clean! I just updadted iTunes to 11.1.3, and tried to sync - with no luck. Then tried the trick of changing backup to iCloud. That did the trick, and now music (and apps, books, ...) are finally syncing again. Fingers crossed that it stays that way. Many solutions around. Most likely different sets of files in iOS 7 that are corrupted, and different approaches needed to flush them out.

Finally figured out a solution to transferring music - - - - - I picked up a new 5s last Friday (iOS 7.03) and could not get it to sync my music no matter what I tried (iTunes fully updated as well). I fully rebooted the phone and it didn't help. My iPad still syncs just fine, and it's on iOS7 as well. I have 758 total songs, of which only about 50 are downloaded from iTunes. I just tried something and it worked. I created new playlists just to transfer the music in smaller amounts and it worked. I had tried creating one new playlist for all 758 songs and it didn't work. Once I created smaller playlists (A through E) (F through O), etc, etc, and synced after adding each playlist, all my songs came over. I will say that iTunes does lie to you though. When it says it is "Copying xxx of xxx" over, it may be copying the filename, but not necessarily the file. You have to watch the progress on the phone. It seems as if you get too far ahead of the "real download" - as seen on the phone - the phone will bail on the process. Just have to keep syncing over and over. PS - thanks Apple for this great innovation - maybe bring back the floppy disk next.

Once I updated to IOS 7.0.3, I can see that my music downloaded to my phone in iTunes, but cannot access it on my Iphone 4s. It is taking up space on it. If I try to resync, it tells me I don't have space, though before the "upgade" I had 12 Gig left.

If I want terrible software updates and crashes I would have stayed with Windows. Now that Apple is as crappy as MS, why not switch? I'm REALLY thinking about going away from Apple.

Good job Apple, you stink too.

Me again.

I'm even more confused now. I recently updated my old iPhone 4 to iOS 7—I wish I hadn't, but I did—only, it is still syncing flawlessly. I set it up as a new phone, and my intention was to use it as a fixed music player in my stereo setup. (It has no cell service attached to it.)

So here's what I have:

1. iPhone 5s ATT 64GB iOS 7.0.3 --- will not sync playlists from iTunes --- I have restored it, set it up as a new phone, disabled all the recommended features mentioned in this forum --- music syncs crap out after a couple hundred songs.

2. iPhone 4 no service 32GB iOS 7.0.3 --- syncs flawlessly from the exact same mac, same playlists, no issues whatsoever (except that many times iTunes claims to be copying songs to the device that were already on there—not sure what that's about)

I'm not sure what to take away from this, except that—bottom line—syncing music from iTunes in iOS 7 is inconsistent at best. Yes, there are workarounds, but let's not forget that in iOS 6 (and previous versions) the vast majority of us had no problems syncing music at all.

This is still a big problem!

Cheers to PhatLu! For the first time in 4 weeks I maganged to sync without having to first erase my Ipad.

I followed the steps in this link:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451

Now I managed to sync just one list without currupting other files on the Ipad.

Make sure to:

* Never abort a sync even if it takes long to finish.

* Make a backup te files in your Itunes lists before starting the procedure

Good luck!

i acknowledge and raise your frustration to quantum levels. between the itunes debacle and the IMESSAGE b.s., which everyone i know with an iphone has been experiencing for the last week, IT'S BEYOND FRUSTRATION. is apple TRYING TO SEND US TO THE COMPETITION? it feels like it. and i've already been shopping for hackintoshes and android based phones. giving more money to the jerks who do nothing to reward loyal customers is the height of stupidity. now i know that i'm not the brightest bulb, but even morons like me have their limit.

This is so annoying.

Can't sync music on both iPad and iPhone 4s (both on iOS 7.0.3, iTunes is 11.1.3). Syncing always gets stuck at 'Waiting for changes to be applied'. Unsyncing music stops there too. Tried everything mentioned before, but nothing worked so far. I am afraid that restoring as a new device is no option for me. Yesterday I restored the iPhone from backup - music sync worked fine after that. But today I am facing the same issue again. I don't have the time to restore my devices everytime I want to sync some music..

Would really like to write to Apple Support directly, but it seems like this is not possible. So please, do something, Apple Support!

I'm having this problem all of the sudden, too. I can sync music to my ipad just fine, but my tv shows aren't syncing with the ipad. However, music is not syncing to my iphone 5. I really, really, really hate ios7!

Any idea on why music works on one and not the other? And same with my tv shows. All music and shows are purchased from itunes.

Ok, folks. I have tried evrything a million times on my iPhone 4s with no luck.

(Total reset was not an option for me)

Today I tried to sync over a different network than my usual.

All of a sudden it syncs! Tried a couple of playlists first and it went well. Then I selected some 10 more playlists and its syncs! But THIS IS IMPORTANT! It appeares to continue to sync in background even after iTunes show that the sync is done. You can still see the sync symbol spinning in top bar of the iPhone. And if you look at the section "On this iPhone" in iTunes you can see a list of your songs but in gray. Some with an empty circle. When I browesed through this list I noticed that one circle was getting dark. It seem to be the song currently transfered. On Wifi This is not really a highspeed action so it takes some time but it is good to feel there is something happening. The cover art is also apearing step by step in the iPhone. And the red circles are fewer and fewer as it syncs.

It is worth noticing that music in the cloud in not aviable in many countries yet so these kind of solutions don´t always apply.

My "solution" worked without any very special tricks in the end. Just WiFi sync over a different network.

Good luck! This is one of the sadest errors in iOS-history I would say. The music and integration with iTunes is on of the cornerstones of iOS and the devices for it.

After multiple attempts to sync last night I now find my phone won't connect to my Bluetooth anymore.

The music won't sync in the phone; videos won't sync on iPad; and now phone won't connect to Bluetooth. I've tried turning everything off and back on. I even tried just downloading from iCloud and iTunes and that didn't work for the phone. It added some videos on iPad but once I try to sync on the computer (Mac Air) they vanish.

Initially my problem was that TV Shows and Movies on my iPad mini under iOS 7 (connected to iTunes 11.1.2 on a MacBook Air under Mac OS X 10.8.5) would not sync. This problem started happening immediately after the iTunes 11.1.2 upgrade on my Mac, not when I installed iOS 7 on both my iPhone and iPad. I'm only having a problem with my iPad mini, not my iPhone 5.

I tried closing and relaunch apps, rebooting Mac and iPad. After a full iPad restore from backup my TV Shows and Movies started syncing again -- but whereas my Music used to sync, now it would not! iTunes would hang on "Waiting for changes to be applied" for a long time and then copy over about 10 songs before canceling out -- no matter what I did.

I've tried manually managing my music, creating smaller and larger playlists etc., many of the creative ideas mentioned here, WiFi sync on/off, Find My Phone on/off etc. -- all to no avail.

However, enabling and then futzing with the bit rate in "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbbs AAC"* has allowed iTunes to copy over many more songs, but still not all. Changing the bit rate from 128 to 192 and then 256 allowed even more songs to copy over -- but even theses longer runs of copying would eventually cancel out before completing.

*Connect iPad to Mac, when the device shows up in iTunes select it, from the "Summary" tab scroll down to "Options" and check off "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbbs AAC". Then sync.

I have just updated to 11.1.3, thinking 'surely they will have solved this issue now', but no such luck. I find it truly incredible that such a major flaw is being allowed to persist. For many people, myself included, this is pretty much the only reason we have an iPhone - I want my music on it, and I want to be able to update it regularly.

I had limited success in simply unchecking 'sync music' and then checking it again, i.e. that seemed to put my music onto the phone but didn't update all playlists. And in any case, that is time consuming and hardly a solution.

I have put in feedback to Apple using the form, I can only suggest that loads of people do the same.

I've had the same problem that most others have had. I have an iPhone 4S with 64Gb on iOS 7.0.3 and iTunes 11.1.2.32 on Windows 8. I have almost 9000 songs on my phone normally, and although I have a number of smaller playlists I have a master playlist containing all songs to be sync'd. I've always synced just selected playlists and ticked items, and converted higher quality to AAC 256.

I tried all sorts of things suggested on this topic, but refused to reset to facxtory settings and start again: it takes forever to sync that many! At the beginning of ther week it seemed to work for me, though, when I unticked 'only sync ticked songs'. Next sync seemed to work perfectly.

Today though, iTunes and iPhone threw a wobbly with an update to Facebook. It wouldn't update properly on either. I deleted it from iTunes sync, then added it on the next sync. iTunes list of apps suggested it was installed but it wasn't appearing on the screen representations nor on the phone itself. Had to delete then reinstall it then it worked. During all this I wasn't paying much attention to the music, but then noticed that a huge chunk of music had disappeared again. I guess since last week at some point I unwittingly checked the 'only sync ticked songs' box.

I unticked it again, but it took four further sync attempts to get all songs appearing on the iPhone again. One the final sync it stuck on 103/103 for what seemed like 15 minutes before the sync finished, but all appears to be good again now :-)

Souwester wrote:

I've had the same problem that most others have had. I have an iPhone 4S with 64Gb on iOS 7.0.3 and iTunes 11.1.2.32 on Windows 8. I have almost 9000 songs on my phone normally, and although I have a number of smaller playlists I have a master playlist containing all songs to be sync'd. I've always synced just selected playlists and ticked items, and converted higher quality to AAC 256.

That's very much like me, except I convert to 128 Kbps. Starting over with newly created playlists may be worth a try if you continue to have trouble; it seems to be the thing that finally worked for me.

Have read this entire thread after my smart playlists stopped syncing properly, suspiciously immediately after the latest iTunes update. Tried everything in this post from restore of iPhone to all the tips and tricks about the smart playlists. Here's what eventually worked for me:

I rolled my computer back to my Acronis weekly backup from last weekend, only a week ago and the computer is really a HTPC so didn't lose anything really. My main aim in doing this was to get the older version of iTunes back as I was convinced that's where the problem was.

After getting that all done I got my playlist I sync no problem and thought "problem solved!" That was until I edited one if the smart playlists to exclude one star songs from the list and wouldn't you know it, blank playlist on the iPhone again! Removed that condition from the smart playlist and voila! All working normally again.

I trawled this thread again and found what fixed it for me was what someone else had posted (apologies I can't remember who and can't be bothered to trawl again to link to the person but kudos to them).

All I did was add the condition to the smart playlist to select from the playlist Music' and everything synced over again. This would really make it seem like iOS7 has an issue with some smart playlist parameters as reading the thread many people seem to not have had this issue on iOS6. Regardless, it's bloody annoying considering the whole reason I got an Apple device was I wanted a system for getting music on my phone that would just work, I mean that's what Apple cut it's teeth on in the portable device arena.

Anyway, it all seems to be working again now but I'm not going to upgrade iTunes until I've got another backup tonight and even then I'm leery of doing it. What a palava!

All this on iPhone 5 and iOS 7.03