Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

This is infuriating.

The single reason I bought a 64GB iPhone 4S is now moot.  I've tried every combination of every solution possible aside from reinstalling Windows on my PC.  Since updating to iOS 7 and the coinciding iTunes update I have not been able to sync more than 200 songs to my phone.

Apple, this is unacceptable.  If this isn't resolved soon I will be heading to an Apple Store demanding a functioning phone or a refund.

I tried every single suggestion on this thread and still nothing has worked.  EXCEPT for one way.  If I ask Siri to play a certain playlist or song; for some magical and bizarre reason; it will play.  I can't see certain songs and I cannot see any of my playlists but if I ask her to play Recently Added or any of my other playlists; the phone will play them. 

I hope Apple will see our frustrations and find a fix to this bug very soon.  As a long time Apple and iPhone user...I am seroulsy reconsidering my future putchases with this company. 

Good luck everyone.  I'm curious if Siri will also find your lost music. 

Well, my 5S had been working fine up to tonight, when it failed in the way described in this thread.  In my case, a workaround was to uncheck the "sync music" item and let iTunes remove all of the music from my iPhone, then re-check it, sync again, and wait for it to reload 11000+ songs back to my phone.  I took several minutes of "waiting for changes to copied" before I could see it writing songs to the phone.

I have several large smart playlists that rotate music on and off my phone based on last play date.  Don't know how that plays into it.  Like I said, it worked fine at first.  Perhaps 7.02 is the cause. 

Again, it's a workaround and not a solution.  Apple needs to find a solution and get it out.  This is unacceptable.

I have a 32 GB 5s. "Syncing Music" cancels midway, especially if Im trying to upload a lot of music at once to my iphone. Only workaround I have found so far is to upload one album at a time. Super frustrating.

I have a 32 GB 5s. "Syncing Music" cancels midway, especially if Im trying to upload a lot of music at once to my iphone. Only workaround I have found so far is to upload one album at a time. Super frustrating.

UPDATE: Unchecked "Convert Higher Bit Rate Songs to:" and issues went away. This may be the source of the bug.

Erroneous. Unchecking the "Convert Higher Bit Rate Songs to:" did not work on my 4s 64GB. I've tried every single work around/solution in this thread and on the internet. I've even tried a set up and sync on my old XP box. Nada.

I'm not sure why 5s users have any problems. I've had ZERO issues syncing or adding music to my 5s. This seems to be mainly an issue with the 4 and 4s models.

Has Apple even ackowledge or confirmed the sync issues with 4 models? I'm concerned they have no clue whats going on. Early reports state that the 7.0.3 update expected sometime this month will only address battery life issues and bugs within the 5s. It will also correct a wifi issue common in 4s after the update. But not one mention of the syncing issue which to me seems like one the biggest problems facing iOS 7 and the 4s.

If anyone can shed any light or news about a possible fix on the horizon I would be most grateful.

Thanks,

I solved it!!!

make sure "manually manage music" is unchecked (it wasn't for me) i unchecked it and sure enough everything synced just fine

I've been through all of these communities and THIS link truly helped!!! I has to do with playing around, patiently with the manual settings in your itunes

http://osxdaily.com/2013/06/30/itunes-not-syncing-iphone-ipad-ipod-fix/

try this out, Mine worked after step 2. I hope it works for others!!!

"sync only checked songs and videos" and "manually manage music and videos" should be checked. And deleting your previous back ups....sound risky, but it works.

i think we've all done this. it's standard general info which is not a fix for ios7.

i wish it had worked for me though.

i tried all this stuff but had to backup all my stuff manually and set my phone up as a 'new phone'. it now syncs music ok everytime. this is the only method i found after 4 days of experiments. i think i restored my phone 6 times in all.

if i restore with a backup file it will not sync music after the 1st sync (where it adds all the music and video contenet for the 1st time)

I have this same "Waiting for changes to be applied" issue -- and podcasts are just randomly sync'd now.  The Podcasts app has been a horrible mess since it was forked from iTunes, but now it's a complete joke because it can't even reliably sync podcasts with my macbook.

OK... After going through numerous resets and rebuilds due to corrupt data, I worked out the issue.

Whilst iTunes says "WAITING FOR ITEMS TO COPY", the ipod/iphone is building an index. This happens at about 1 song every second - so 60 songs takes a minute. If you have 14,000 songs, expect it to take nearly 4 hours.... it is doing something although I tunes looks like it has hung.... don't eject or cancel sync as it corrupts the non-indexed music and it fills your ipod with a block that can only be removed with a re-set.

Hope this helps

I tried setting up my iPhone5 as a 'new phone' twice to fix a sync hanging problem, but it didn't fix it except for the initial sync. What seems to have fixed it for me was exporting the iTunes library xml, then deleting the current library files and re-importing the library. 

This fixed an odd problem I had well before the sync problem: Pressing the "Done" button in the iTunes iPhone panel would almost always ask to apply changes, even if I hadn't made any. Setting up the phone as new had no effect on this, so this may be a sign that it's an iTunes problem instead of the device.

This reply makes complete sense - I've been having the same issue since Saturday and it's been driving me insane, but thinking back to Saturday evening, when transferring a bunch of songs to my 5s my iTunes hung on "WAITING FOR ITEMS TO COPY" for like 20 minutes. I thought iTunes had crashed so pulled the plug and transferred the songs again, this time without a delay. However, this is the exact point the missing songs issue started for me, so it could well be directly related to me pulling the plug while an index was being built and corrupting something.

Earthboy - would I need to do a full reset of my phone? Or just restore an old backup? Or is it as simple and deleting all music and transferring everything again?

UPDATE: aaaand it broke again. I updated one of my smart playlists to a higher GB limit (to sync 5 more GB of music) and it went back to what it was doing before—it quit sometime during the syncing process and I ended up with a bunch of albums with only one track on them (usually the first).

ugh, this blows.

nun4db wrote:

 

Okay, I finally got things syncing normally again, and here's how:

 

(sorry if this is repeating previous posts)

 

1. on the iPhone, go to Settings>General>Usage>Music and delete all music data.

2. connect iPhone to iTunes on Mac, in the Music tab uncheck "sync music," then in the general tab check "manually manage music." do a sync on the phone. no music will be synced.

3. now uncheck "manually manage music," then go back and select the playlists you want to sync (in my case, a smart playlist with about 10GB of music). for me, everything worked correctly from this point on.

 

 

This is an odd solution, especially given the checking and unchecking of "manually manage music," but perhaps this additional step clears something off of the phone relating to music syncing that was mucking things up. When I got my 5s I did a restore from backup from my iPhone 4, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was some messy data that came over in that process.

 

Now I just get to wait and see if things continue behaving normally, or if this was a one time fluke.

 

Good luck everyone!

 

 

D