Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

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.

You can at least submit feedback to Apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

No idea if anyone actually reads it. 

paulfratelli wrote:

 

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!

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.

While this worked, it did remove my favorites lists, but I think you are on the right path- thanks!

(It also did not recover my ringtones)

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

I am having sync problems too. iOs 7.0.3. Itunes 11.1.3.8. Will not sync music, it shows on itunes looking at music on device, all tracks greyed out with dotted circle on the left column for every track. When syncing, it says my phone has disconnected from itunes even when it hasn't. It hangs on step 7 when copying files. Even sees my phone when it is disconnected and starts to run backup!!! Apple guys, please reply to me and tell me what to do!! It worked fine until installed updates. Come on!! Help me out Apple!!!

My sync copy on step 4 and it doesn't go to anymore steps.  Are some different?

Well, having got a properly sync'd phone yesterday, I perhaps somewhat foolishly, thought I'd push my luck and add in my Chriustmas playlist yesterday evening. It's been a complete pain again, and has added many of them, and on a couple fo further sync attempts one or two more, but the last few attempts have added nothing extra.

What seems odd is that in trying to add the extra playlist has buggered the memory requirements. I did some jiggery pokery to remove some existing songs, so that the memory usage bar in iTunes showed there was about 200mb capacity. When I tried to do the sync it said I needed an extra 450Mb or so, so I deleted an in-app purchase of some Ordnace Survey maps which take up that kind of space.

Having  tried to sync again umpteen times, the iPhone free memory came down to 66Mb with 170 songs not transferred. The iTunes memory showed rather more free. Thinking that a lack of memory might be the reason for the remaining songs not transferring I temoprarily deleted another 400Mb of OS maps, but still no further songs will sync. The iPhone is now saying I have 407Mb free (with no OS maps on it), and iTunes is showing 1.47Gb free.

This is really beginning to **** me off now.