Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

47 freaking pages of non-stop problems and nothing from Apple.   Did they even TRY to QA this update before the jammed it down all of our throats?

Syncing hasn't worked for months, none of my songs THAT I PAID FOR have been available for months and Apple has offered NOTHING by way of solutions.  

Great job Apple, give all your programmer some big holiday bonuses, they really deserve it. 

have u... called applecare and had an advisor go through any troubleshooting with u to get that fixed? because if not ur reallly just complaining about something u havnt even tried to fix... just saying.

I checked if my music had deleted after step one, but it didnt look like it did. I opened one of my playlists, and the song had an iCloud download sign next to it. I'm assuming that it keeps the song name, but the file is no longer there.

I don't know if this has anything to do with the slow syncs, I just upgraded to the latest from a semi stable itunes 10.7 and ios 6.1.4 to feel the disappointment shared in this thread (I didn't possibly imagine a year ago when I got a new phone that apple would  put out buggier and buggier software with each successive release.. to the point where it is barely usable. This ain't the itunes 10.6/ios 5 combo I remember)

I don't have enough room on the phone for everything so I have about a dozen playlists I sync that are forever adding and removing songs (the settings are "only sync selected songs/playlists"... not one song is synced, but rather a few static playlists for stuff I want to keep on the phone and several smart playlists to make up the difference and swap in/and out songs I can live without but it puts on in a sort of "radio playlist" sort of way). It has to re-evaluate all candidate songs to sync on a playlist each time I sync, so it pretty much means I don't have the problem of songs not showing up when they should (at least I haven't seen that yet)

It takes my computer 10 minutes to sync my phone with itunes over USB (even if I just finished another sync and it has nothing new to sync). I also went into the settings very early and turned off all settings I could find that could be related to showing, accessing or downloading icloud copies (no icloud storage of music for me)

Using open source tools I looked at the iphone's drive contents and I noticed this version of ios (7.0.4) creates a lot of artwork files for the music on the phone (or maybe it always has and I didn't see them all.). In previous versions, and even on itunes, it seems that when you fetch album artwork it saves a single copy of the artwork for the entire album. This doesn't appear to be the case any more. It seems every track gets a duplicate copy of the artwork.

I have a bad feeling ios 7.0.4 (and possibly earlier revisions of ios 7) is spending a lot of its time going through the music and comparing the extracted artwork for each song against the artwork in the files themselves.

This could be an attempt to "fix" the problem earlier ios versions had with artwork that would spontaneously mess up its artwork. (happened to me many times and the only cure would be to remove the offending album from the device and putting it back on)

If anybody has a spare setup to experiment, I would be curious if:

- 10,000 songs with NO artwork, NO metatags would take so long to sync (normal size/duration... average 4 minute songs)

- 10,000 songs of 15 seconds each with NO artwork, NO metatags would sync faster than the above test

- 10,000 songs with metatags, but NO artwork would sync faster/slower than the above

- 10,000 songs of 15 seconds each with artwork AND metatags would sync faster/slower than the above

- 10,000 songs of normal size/duration with artwork AND metatags would sync faster/slower than the above

- songs with varying size artwork (100x100 used for all, then slowly increase artwork size to 600x600, 100 at a time) has an impact.

I am sure some of the problems are related to upgrading the ios from an earlier version and the database is slightly different and other problems are symptoms of a stray gamma ray burst or too many strangers walking a certain way at the same time. I ran into this problem right after upgrading and thought this can't be right... It took me three complete factory wipe/reinstalls before I just let it be and discovered it's not permanently stuck in some race condition, it just takes that long. At least for me, I know that the ios music database has been rebuilt from scratch.

I miss the ios 5 days for the music player and sync speeds.

Yes calling apple support  would be a good idea instead of ranting into the wind in this endless post-a-thon

If you haven't figured out what to do yet my condolences. It is a major pain in the a** but it evidently doen't affect every device or setup out there.

1. suggestion I have is make **** sure you don't have someone elses purchased itunes in your library. In your itunes Library. sort by Kind and if the type is "Purchased AAC audio file" do a ctrl+i to check the info and in the summary tab it will tell you the Apple ID of the song and if it isnt yours.... I have no idea why this worked for me but if you ever backed up your device to the cloud or did an itunes match that might have something to do with it.

Forget about restoring from an already borked backup do a complete reset and start again paying attention to what options you have checked. Start with one small playlist and do each one until you find the one that causes the problem.

2. also if you have "Sync only checked songs and videos" in the Summary for your device make sure that you have them checked . BTW Thank you whoever in Apple for making the shading of the itunes skin white-pale gray-slightly grayer so visually striking everything just stands out so dramatically also cheers to whoever wanted hiding scroll bars (at least there is a utility out there to fix that)

Good luck and be logical in your efforts

btw if you are tired of getting the email for this thread go to the original discussion in the apple support community and at the top right of the page click on the action  Stop email notifications 

So after weeks of battling this issue and trying out everyone's proposed solutions, I finally bit the bullet and wiped my phone setting it up as a new device (instead of using an iCloud backup). It was a mini-project within itself configuring my phone to match what existing but I finally finished. I am happy to report that all my music is syncing flawlessly, iTunes no longer freezes or hangs mid-sync, the "ghost" songs have disappeared from my iPhone, and even my battery life has improved. Just wanted to share in case it helps others.

Happy holidays and best of luck!

Thank You Thank You Thank You!!!! Lifesaver! It worked just as you said.

Lots of feedbacks but none really addressing the issue at hand. This is actually very easy to fix. If your question is "I've restored my iPod or iPhone and want to sync using iTunes on a Mac, using the latest version of iTunes but no data (i.e. music etc) transfers when I do this" then all you need to do is connect your device to your Mac and click on your device and go to > Options then uncheck "Manually Manage Music and Videos". You will then need to click > Apply. This will show you a prompt which will allow you to re-sync again with your iTunes. I've tested this on iPhone and iPod Touch latest versions.

Having tried all the complicated fixes (one of them did work as I got my library back on my phone) I discovered the same problem on my iPad. This time, I tried the fix of just turning off my passcode lock before syncing. Admittedly, I didn't sync across my whole library (only some of the playlists) but they were the same ones that had disappeared from my iPad, and they re-appeared after sync with the passlock off. Seems a little less drastic than resetting the phone, so I hope it helps others as well

I tried turning off my passcode, but this didn't fix it either. My playlists still won't sync.

To those who say to contact Applecare - have you been reading the posts? People have contacted Apple, and even the techs there have no clue what to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

And what about us that are no longer under the Applecare program? We're supposed to pay them more money to fix something that they messed up in the first place?

We shouldn't have to go through such extremes just to sync our music to our phones. After all - they are also phones, so I imagine most of us want to be able to use them as such instead of having them tied to our computer and trying to sync them for hours and hours.

The folks at Apple really need to pull their heads out and fix this problem with iOS7. There were no similar issues with iOS6. In fact, my iPod still uses iOS6, and it perfectly syncs the exact same information that my iPhone with iOS7 won't.

I have the 4S on windows 7 machine. Since the upgrade to iOS7, haven't been able to sync my phone or my iPad, both are 32gb. Have tried everything on here and nothing gets the devices to sync, apart from the hard reset, which then transferred everything as normal. However I have to do a hard reset each time I want to sync, which I do not want to do. I have iTunes Match which does not work properly, I cannot transfer my music between devices or manage music properly because of iTunes Match not working. Apple have been useless and I was planning to get a new iPhone 5s, but after all these issues, i changed my mind. I have ordered a Samsung galaxy instead, not at all happy with apple.  Having to do a hard reset on all devices to sync is a joke and not good enough. Will replace my iPad soon and it will not be with a new iPad. 

I've been having this syncing issue ever since the big iOS update on my iPhone 4. I tried many things seen in this thread, but this is what worked for me.

• Start iTunes on your computer
• Connect your iPhone and let it Sync
• Select your phone among the devices in iTunes
• Select the tab for Music
• Uncheck the "Sync Music" and then hit "Apply" (down at bottom of page).  NOTE: this will remove all the music from your phone but it will not affect your iTunes library.
• After the phone has synced and removed all the music, Go back to the same Music tab for your phone in iTunes and re-check "Sync Music".  Then sync your phone again with iTunes.  It will now reload all the music in your library back on to your phone. 

There is one caveat to this though: it works, but every time I add new music--either to my library or to a Playlist--I have to repeat this procedure. I only have about 560 songs, so it doesn't take extraordinarily long for me to do this, but it's still a pain. I just refuse to reset/restore my phone though. I'm stubborn like that.

I will add that I have downloaded the Amazon Cloud Player app and I have it on my phone and my PC and my iPad too. I have imported all my iTunes music over to that so that I have all my music backed up because I no longer trust iTunes. I may just start using that instead of iTunes once I use up the iTunes gifts cards I got for Xmas so I don't have to be bothered with this iTunes music sync crap any longer. Then in the future I will only need to use iTunes for buying songs I might not be able to find on Amazon, and I can import them right into the Cloud Player. And if Apple doesn't actually fix this sync business, when I'm ready for a new phone (my iPhone 4 could sure use an upgrade), I don't plan on it being an iPhone, so I'll be shopping for something else.

Had the same frustrations...but there is nothing complicated about fixing this...simply uncheck "manually manage music and videos", then go through the music, tv, etc. tabs and ensure the correct stuff is selected and sync...Magic...your iPhone/Pad/Pod will happily be syncing music properly again.

I had that same bizarre symptom. My iPhone 4 was suddenly "over" capacity with gigs of "other".  b3l33's steps worked for me, though I had to do another resync to get my apps and music resintalled on the restored phone.

My last sync (before upgrade to iOS 7) I had gigs of space left on my phone. first sync after upgrade, I was way over capacity and stuck with 'waiting to start sync'.

One thing I noticed is now that I've followed your steps, space used by "photos' is now separately called out and no longer under "other" and "documents" is also separate. Now my "other" is super tiny and I've got 13 gigs free again.

Same problems here: "Other" category now at 27GB, music not syncing, iTunes crashing... Wow!!! I've tried all of the recommendations in this thread and the problem keeps coming back. All the family gadgets are going through similar issues. I used to criticize other plattforms and advocate in favor of Apple all the time, but now it feels as if we're dealinf with a different company. the seamless integration of hardware and software that Steve Jobs used to talk about, I don't see it. I can't play the music I paid for!!! How long will it take Apple to fix this or should we start migrating to Google/Amazon???