Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

Hi

Scrolling through posts which are all appreciated.

I have iphone 5 - all i want to do is sync to itunes on my pc and add music that i have added to folders. I have plenty of space so no probs there. I want to add about 1gb of music for reference

However all that happens is i click sync - it goes through the first 4 steps of syncing the on 5 of 5 "waiting for changes to be applied" it hangs for ages but doesn't update the music in the folders on my phone.

That said by luck i has transferred and updated the folders but this was more luck than judgement.

I accept i'm not the sharpest knife in the box but syncing should be straightforward?

What am i doing wrong ? Or indeed what works on a regular basis?

Many thanks.

Also unable to sync only the music to my iphone 4s. I tried syncing every which way, following many of the above suggestions.  What finally worked was to, under the SUMMARY tab, select MANUALLY MANAGE MUSIC AND VIDEOS, then drag a playlist onto the iphone icon on the upper right corner which was connected via USB.  Something in all the manipulations screwed up my Podcasts but I should be able to simply download these via wireless.  iTunes gets less functional with every update; Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave.

Checking the "Automatically fill free space with songs" box worked for me

where is this box?

ON the ipad3, half my songs were grayed out with the red dot and I was unable to play them, after the latest upgrade to itunes. After 2 days of trying all the suggestions mentioned here and VERY frustrated,I called Apple. My songs are now FIXED!  First: back up your ipad and assume your itunes are also saved in my music.  Then delete itunes:

in Win 7 from control panel, go to uninstall and remove in this order- itunes,  apple software,  apple mobile device support,  bonjour,  apple application support. Close and restart computer.

reinstall itunes @ itunes.com

then restore ipad to factory settings, this took about 3/4 hour

Restore from this backup,  you can choose an earlier date, but I chose the backup done earlier the same day.

When the backup was done, it synced and copied all apps, books and songs completely. In the summary page for ipad I had none of the choices for syncing checked, they were blank for the restore.  Happy again!

See DEELIS solution Feb 3

Here's my voodoo. In the absence of any useful advice from Apple, everyone seems to have their own recipe to deal with this, but nothing works consistently because it's simply guesswork.

iphone5s with ios 7.0.5 (11B601), itunes 11.1.4 (62) on MacBook Pro 13" (2.3 GHz i5, 4GB 1333 DDR3, 320GB disk with 68 GB free) running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63b). Has never synced media (Music, Podcasts, itunesU, etc) successfully since iphone5s purchased in early Jan.

Initially setup iphone5s by restoring from backup of previous iphone (4). Around half the music loaded, in alphabetical order (i.e. artists from A to M). No amount of changing selections would get it to load the other half. So tried resetting to factory settings and setting phone up as new phone, i.e. not restoring from any backup. Media then wouldn't sync at all, whatever options (playlists, artists, etc) were selected. Tried turning itunes Match off and on, and tried changing iCloud settings. Only minor progress was could download versions of what itunes thought I had (it being a bit rubbish at reading ID3 tags sometimes) from the cloud, which ended up with increasing numbers of duplications and versions of tracks I didn't want (or even completely wrong tracks), as syncing between iphone and itunes led to itunes thinking I'd got two versions of tracks. Increasingly unwealdy, so reset completely again.

Latest effort is to delete all backups in itunes, unmount and restart the phone, change the phone's name, restart itunes, plug the phone back in and hope that itunes thinks it's a new phone. I hadn't de-selected some of the playlists that I wanted to sync, to first sync failed to add any tracks again. However, unticking all playlists, artists, etc, syncing, then ticking a playlist and syncing again led to the phone finally syncing the selected track. And not only that - the podcasts, itunesU content etc that wouldn't sync, also synced with it, even though I hadn't changed anything on their tabs. Thinking it was now working, I selected the other playlists (around 8 of them containing around 1,000 songs) to sync, which duly failed. So I unselected all except the original playlist that had succeeded and synced again, to take it back to just the one synced playlist. I then selected one more playlist to sync (with around 120 tracks), and that worked. I am now going to try selecting them one by one, in case itunes/iphone5s is so useless that it can't cope with syncing more than one playlist or more than a few dozen tracks at one time.

You can tell Steve Jobs is dead. The number of people having this problem says Apple have a significant quality control problem with their latest software, which wouldn't have got past Jobs. Short-selling or spreadbetting against Apple looks like a good way to make money from hereon in. If they can't make their devices talk to each other efficiently, they have destroyed half the reason that people pay over the odds for Apple products. Looks like a death spiral unless they get a new boss.

Thanks for all this info.   It agrees with my testing that certain playlists seem to cause the problem.   I think this is a problem with smart playlists in general.   I don't belive Apple is blind to this issue.  I am also a software engineer and there are problems with my system that I have never been able to figure out or reproduce, but that I would love to fix.

That said there is a problem with Apple.  They are not here on their own board asking for people to upload their itunes library files, logs or whatever they need to find the problem, or assuring us that they have solved the issue and are working on a fix.  I expect it will be fixed in IOS 7.1, but why not be nice about it.   The give a **** factor is missing, and never has been Apple's strong point.

What worked for me is checking 'manually manage music and videos' in the options tab of your device's "summary" menu.

The other night I wanted to add new music to my phone (iphone 5 64GB) and tried a few things.  My sync was successful and done in under 2 minutes, adding 2 cds worth of music.  I have not downloaded the latest updates that just recently came out so I am an update behind on itunes and ios 7. Here is what worked for me...

I turned off wi-fi and disabled find my iphone.  I then closed all running apps/settings on the phone.  I plugged it in to my PC (Windows 8). I have manually managed music marked in settings, no other strange settings.  I pulled up my library and highlighted the songs I wanted to add and dragged (to the right of the screen) and dropped them into my iphone (not a new playlist).  Once this was done, I went back to the summary page and clicked sync and it worked like a charm.  No music was removed and all songs were on my phone...no greyed out circles on any of the new songs or previous purchased itunes music either.  Just to make sure it was working correctly, I synced my ipod touch (4gen).  I had previously been having the same issue with it as well so this was a true test.  I did the same thing by dragging and dropping the tracks I wanted to my ipod (I had more music to add since I had been afraid to update since my last sync debacle a month ago).  Again, it was done in under 2 minutes. 

Not sure if this will work for everyone and I'm not sure if it will work again the next time I do it but it's the first time since September last year that things have worked like they should.  This might be an option for people who just want to add music here and there (from cds) like I do. It's not the greatest fix but I didn't have to restore my iphone for the billionth time either (that in itself can't be good for the phone).  Like most of these suggestions on the forum, hope it works for someone else out there!

Easiest option going, that (for me at least) seemed to work when all other ideas failed:

- Go on to phone settings and turn off find my phone and wifi

- Plug phone into computer and launch itunes

- Highlight and drag music from your library to the device

And voila!

In my case, the sync started automatically after dragging a combined 20-30 tracks onto the phone, and it finally synced the other 1500 i had checked successfully, unlike every thing else I had tried.

So hopefully this helps some of you.

And I thought apple products were meant to be consumer friendly :/

The thing is, we are all trying different things to fix this issue. We are fiddling, messing, hacking, whatever.

The truth is, IOS7 and Apple broke this easy sync and they ought to Man Up and JUST FIX IT.

My wife's Iphone 3GS on IOS6 point something synchs fine. My ancient 2nd Gen Itouch on IOS4 point something synchs fine. My 4S on IOS 6 worked just fine.  With IOS 7 it is broken. I am NOT doing another wipe and reload.

My phone contract has ran out and I can get an iphone 5s but I refuse to until this is sorted. In the mean time I am seriously considering walking away from Apple. My son's Nexus 7 synchs better with iTunes than my IPhone.

APPLE. I AM TALKING TO YOU.

FIX THIS ISSUE.

NOW

u know they dont read this thread right...?

if u want to talk to apple go to apple.com/feedback

Potential New Solution To Syncing Problems!

Like so many others my music syncing suddenly stopped working. I tried all of the typical suggestions on these boards. Here is what finally fixed it for me...talk about obscure.

After I had attempted every music-related feature/option I could think of, I decided to just download the music from the iTunes Store app on my iPhone off of my Purchased list. That's when I noticed a red '1' notification on the More... button at the bottom. I had a single incomplete download sitting in the Downloads queue. A very old one...must have been sitting there for the past 2 months. About how long my syncing has been 'broken'. I deleted that song out of the download queue and attempted another sync from iTunes on my Mac. Voila! My 500-song backlog started syncing over.

Maybe this will help someone else.

Things I have tried so far:

1. Recreating my iTunes Library (2 times): Interestingly enough I noticed that a few of my songs, while still existing perfectly playably in my music folders, did not appear on the new library when I imported the XML sheet. Not sure if that is connect to the issue or not. Did not fix the issue.
2. Managing Music Manually (3 times): Didn't fix the problem at all any of the three times, so moving on. I should also note I couldn't even so much as drag music onto the phone! That failed too!
3. Selecting specific authors/genres (3 times): This actually worked!... once, when I narrowed my authors down to a handful... pretty much the only songs that worked were ones bought from iTunes itself, and a a soundtrack from a game I have. Not satisfactory enough of an answer. Plus it failed the next two times.
4. Restoring the phone to factory (1 time): No impact whatsoever. Starting from scratch did not have any impact on the syncing issue.
5. Checking my iTunes app on the iPhone (1 time): Yeah I didn't have any broken downloads.
   
   And I haven't seen any other response in this (53 page!!) thread that has allowed me to make any progress on this issue. All of them are, more or less, some variation of one of these 5 answers. So as you can imagine, with how long this issue has been going on, I a bit past being merely frustrated. This is a complete failure to provide service. I physically can't place songs onto my phone anymore after this syncing issue came about, and there hasn't been a word from Apple one way or the other, as far as I know, on the issue. It's really starting to grate.