Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

mike b---

"5) While sync was running I selected through the category tabs for the iPhone content"

what does this mean?

it sounds like a possible fix, but i don't quite understand.

also -- has anyone had the following problem...

after "waiting for changes" for a while, my songs actually started to sync -- i had to stop with 2500 songs left to sync (i'm on my 36th hour of trying to sync 9000 songs). when i started syncing again today, i am getting the following error

"the itunes library cannot be saved. unknown error (-54)"

BUT, my songs are still syncing.

does anyone have any suggestions?

anonomot,

I selected to sync the phone through iTunes, after pressing the sync button and waiting for the 'the iTunes library cannot be saved....' error again I went through the tabs 'rather category buttons' at the top of the iTunes window, 'summery,  info, apps etc.'

My sync actually also synced my music again but it only took about an hour, my iPhone 4 is 16Gb so maybe a 32Gb/64Gb  phone would take a lot longer.

thanks mike. now i get what you're saying.

as for the "itunes library cannot be saved" error, i clicked on the "don't warn me again" and my songs are still syncing. i'm going to ignore the error for now, and see what happens.

i hate this upgrade, and i don't understand why apple hasn't said a single thing about all the problems people are having.

hopefully they are working on a solution.

I'm surprised Apple hasn't chimed in too. I'm sure this really isn't how most of us wanted to spend our weekend.

I did find something that seemed to help. I did a manual backup of my iPhone, and after going through a couple of steps it started copying a little over 200 tracks back to my phone. I saw that it was specifically the tracks that I have attempted to play on the phone but that couldn't be found. After it was done I tried to play some more which the phone also couldn't find, and I did the backup and then sync, and it started adding those specific songs back to the phone. I did it a couple more times trying to keep the number of tracks to a manageable amount - about 150-200. It worked for those other two times, but now it has been stuck for about 10 minutes trying to copy the first track of the next set I selected.

OK..here is what Apple support just instrutcted me to do:  My iTunes Music folder was empty (odd) and they had me then move everything from my iTunes Media folder and drop it into my Automatically Add to iTunes folder and the music folders began to be populated back into my iTunes library.  They then made sure that my iPhone 5S was backed up to he cloud and then go through full factory restore of my iPHone.  I am in that process now and will update everyone on my succes or (hopefully) not....

full factory restore??? that *****! it's one thing if you have 200 songs, but it's quite another if you have 9000+, not to mention tons of apps and photos -- and you lose all your settings!.

it's taken me over 36 full hours to copy my music back to my phone -- because of ios 7, no fault of my own. and it still has over 1000 to go. a full factory restore would take days. (why it takes so long to sync my songs is a mystery to me, i'm just glad that it's working, unlike a lot of other people here.)

and that's apple's solution?? that's the best they can do? start from scratch?

i'm really disappointed with apple, and i have been a loyal and exclusive consumer since the days of the mac plus (and that's a looooong time ). they should never have released ios 7 the way it is. full facotry restore indeed!

bigstar -- i hope it works for you, because it would suck even harder if you went through all that, and it didn't!

good luck!

Well, that was worthless.  After following Apple supports' instructions, I so far have none of my non iTunes purchased music syncing with my iPhone 5S iOS7.3.  Incredible amount of time wasted thus far with no results.  It appears as though we will be back on another session tomorrow afternoon.

I do notice that after I dragged my iTunes Media/Music into my Autmoatically Add to iTunes Folder that it was putting ALL my music back into my iTuens library.  Not sure what happened as they are not all there now and my iTunes/iTunes Music folder should have been repopoulated and is empty.

More as I talk tomorrow night.

Agreed.  I cannot believe they do not have a handle on this issue yet as it seems pretty widespread thus far. I, for the first time, am very dissapointed in them.

I have 1,940+ music files.  It is still Determing Gapless Playback Information at this point 3078/1940 and going...

So I finally broke down and went to the genius bar today and they walked me through how to fix this problem.  Apparently it's an issue with the temporary cache that is made when iTunes syncs with iOS 7 on some devices.  When the sync is finished, the music (for whatever reason) remains designated as temporary and is inaccessible via the music app. 

What we found that worked was to wipe the phone and then restore it based on a previous backup.  Then, before syncing with my library, I synced it with another iTunes library and erased it.  This cleared the temp folder up and when I synced it with my iTunes library everything worked.  It's frustrating that this is an issue for so many people and that the solution is so inelegant, but hopefully apple will acknowledge the bug (at least internally) and fix it in the next release of iOS 7.  Best of luck to you all and hopefully you can finish this in less than the 5 hours it took me to figure it out.

Awesome that that worked for you, but if Apple thinks that is an acceptable solution to a problem this widespread...

I got lucky with my iPhone, but I still don't know what I did 'right' to make it start working again. Too scared to plug either of my iPads in to update my music collections, or save a backup.

That is a lot to go through for a problem they have initated for everyone. I have no clue what is happening, as I ws finally able to get 30 or so tracks to finally sync when I tried moving a few at a time.  When  I went back into my library to select a lot more - nothing.

I guess I will call it a long day and get back with Apple again tomorrow night and let them have at my iMac and fix it.  They certainly failed fixing it tonight.

Dear All & Apple,

I have been a very active contributer of this discussion and I believe I have done everything you have suggested without success.

I have two iPhons 4s (64GB) with iOS6 & iOS7 and let you know that only iOS6 works.

Today, I bought a iPhone 5S with iOS7 and succeded in syncing the playlist (the same playlist with "corrupt" music files).

Of course, I cannot explain why. I will do more experiment and let you know the result later.

I finally got mine back up and syncing. Some trial and error for me indicated that Smart Playlists that limited the list to "Checked" files seemed to be causing issues.   My main Playlist is based on this, so I made a new playlist (not a smart one) and just copied over the Checked songs.   After a restore, I was able to sync to that list.

After various testing, my findings are as follows. Note that every iOS and iTunes are updated.

iPhone 4s with iOS6 - sync works just fine.

iPhone 4s with iOS7(upgraded) - no solution yet. I did everything including Hard Reset, Restore, checking and unchecking many things, making new playlists... iOS7 cannot handle a few seemingly corrupted music files. These corrupted files seems like cuasing every problems.

iPhone 5s with iOS7 - sync works just fine. Finally I have about 1500 songs with multiple smart playlists.

This means that there is something wrong with iOS7 upgrading from iOS6. Upgrading process is somehow corrupting a few specific music files. (Or iOS7 just sees them corrupted.) This corruption cannot be fixed even with Restore and starting from the scratch.

Only Apple can fix this issue.

I agree with slee204488. As one of the original and frequent posters to this thread I truly believe this issue is 'mostly" with the 4s.

I have had a 5s since day one and have had zero issues syncing or removing music. However, my 4s which I was going to pass down to a family member, I wiped and upgraded and can not add music to it. I have tried every possible solution mentioned in this thread. I have even tried on several operating systems (XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Mac) and still no luck. I have probably wiped the 8 times and done restored from iCloud and iTunes backup with no results. To me this is clearly an issue with the 4s model.

Moving forward, please start tagging the iPhone/iPod model you are having issues with and the operating system you run iTunes on.

Model: iPhone 4s

iOS: 7.0.3

iTunes: up to date

OS: Windows 8

Please do something Apple or at least acknowledge the issue so we know you are working on something. I think the blatant ignoring of the issue is whats upsetting me the most. I could deal with this if I knew you guys were working on something. Extremely upset and disappointed.