Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

I had a problem. until just now. with my playlists not syncing, and my solution may work for some of you. I did not have the "Waiting for changes to be applied" issue (thank goodness). I don't think I had any missing songs, either. Just songs missing from playlists.

How I identified which songs were missing from my playlists: In iTunes (mine is the Windows version) Playlists, sort each troubled Playlist by a column of your choice, like Name. Then right-click on the playlist name on the left and select Copy To Play Order. Sync to your device(s). Now your playlists in both iTunes and on your devices will have the songs in the same order, making it easy to compare. You do lose your original play order, but I always use shuffle anyway.

In this manner I discovered that song names with parentheses in the name seem to be my entire problem -- they were the songs that were missing from my playlists on my devices. It also seems that a song with a parenthesis can affect the next song in your playlist. This is not good, because all or nearly all these songs were purchased from the iTunes Store, and the song names, as purchased, can have parentheses.

To fix, rename the song names, and then re-sync. It is unfortunate to lose your original song names. All the more so that when (I assume) Apple fixes this issue, you shouldn't need your songs renamed any longer. So as to not lose the parenthetical information from your song name, I suggest replacing the first parentheses with a hyphen and a space, and not deleting the words. Word of caution: I don't know if there are any unintended consequences of changing your purchased song names.

One way to find straggler songs that still have parentheses: In iTunes, go to Songs. Upper right, in the Search Library box, type a left parenthesis. The resulting list is broken down by Artists, Albums, etc. Find Songs, and hit the Show (all) text. This will show the songs with parentheses, although I don't think it allows you to rename the songs from here.

I have so many songs with parentheses, that I'm giving up for tonight. So, I still have the problem, but, no longer do I have it with with the songs I've renamed.

Windows iTunes 11.1.5.5   iPad and iPhone 5 with 7.0.6

Just looked at my itunes. Seems to have given up waiting for changes to be applied now, and still the new tracks plus 2 older ones are still greyed out. Only one of the tracks has parentheses. On the other hand, hundreds that are already on the phone DO have parentheses.

We are clutching at straws here. APPLE DO SOMETHIGN

I've been due for an upgrade for several months now, but I keep holding off on getting the 5S hoping that they will fix this issue. I am the owner of several Apple products and I've always loved them, but I am seriously contemplating getting a Galaxy instead.

Simplysounds, would you please do us the kindness of letting us know how that all turns out with putting your iTunes music on it? If we can get some confirmation that Samsung's product works well with iTunes, I think a lot of us may decide to jump ship at this point. Seven months is a ridiculous amount of time to be waiting for this issue to be resolved.

simplysounds wrote:

 

solved the issue for good!

 

after the last five years of having apple products (and spending over 100 hours resting phones/talking with apple in usa)....

 

i just bought a samsung galaxy note 3

 

apple need to face up to the problem. apple are shooting themselves in the foot and getting left behind.

 

bye bye apple!

Will do. Just collected the note 3 which I'm typing on as we speak. Just waiting for the 64gb memory card to arrive then I'll report back later next week.

It's not just parenthesis. Album cover art can also be a problem. Half my library refused to sync due to album cover art that iOS refused to accept. Parenthesis and other small bits in  the metadata might be the cause of my other problems.

It seems as if iTunes and iOS 7 refuse to play nicely with metadata that wasn't provided by Apple.

There is one other, MAJOR problem - when music does sync, my iPad mini will occasionally label music files as "other files," and they remain on the device even after I clear off all the music. I went from 1GB of "other files" to 8GB of "other files." I've only owned the iPad for less than 48 hours and I've re-synced the device at least 20 times. Always the same issue, where music files get lost.

I'm having problems with syncing my music too... it is driving me insane!

i have 4 playlists on my phone, and if i add new songs that i just purchased to a playlist, sync my phone, the songs arent there.  I can download them from icloud and then add them manually to my phone/playlist but then if I sync again, they're deleted out of the playlist and have to do it over! 

i tried getting rid of all my music and syncing it with no music on it (doesnt work)

i tried deleting my playlists off my phone (which ended up deleting them off my computer as well and had to recreate them)

and now, if i sync 1 playlist, all 4 are still there and all my music is still there, but if i try to play songs, it just skips to the next so i can't listen to half the music thats listed on there

so aggravating! i took out my old ipod nano and have been playing that in my car instead because i'm tired of trying

Well I'm back in the "dog house" smh! Yes I got my songs onto my phone that wasn't syncing on its own but now I have a new problem! There are missing songs from playlists on my phone and on my computer! All missing songs were purchased in the iTunes music store too.

Everytime I do a sync, iTunes says it's backing up my phone. Where can I find those backups on my computer? I located the folder with previous iTunes libraries but it's not showing anything from 2014. I'm thinking I need to resort back to an old backup and load that up to get all my songs back in my playlists like I had them. A lot of my missing songs are greyed out with a dotted line circle next to them. Also for only one of my playlists, it automatically created a duplicate playlist but puts a number 1 after it. I have no idea what the heck is going on and I don't think Apple does either.

@melissa82686 try completely closing down iTunes then open it back up and click on Store in your top menu and scroll down to Check for Available Downloads. Sometimes for whatever reason your music won't fully download when you buy them from the iTunes Store. Once you do that you will see them progress bar showing them being downloaded and imported into your library.

My issue is when I select a Playlist, on the Iphone 5 it says No Content. But when the phone is connected to Itunes and select that Playlist, all the songs are there. Again, when I look at the same playlist on the phone, it says No Content, no matter how many times I synch. If I look at the phone and selects songs, then the songs are there,

This is fine but if I have many Playlists, I JUST WANT TO HEAR THE SONGS ON THAT P.LAYLIST,

IOS 7 is the problem.

CMON APPLE! FIX IT!

Also one user stated that if you want to restore from an earlier point it seems you don't have many choices. ****, I would got back to IOS 6 if I could at this point!

Let me give a little more Detail.

I wanted to rate my songs. SO I created a Smart Playlist called 200 Never Rated.

Criterea is Rating is No Stars

                    Plays is Greater than 4

What happens is in Itunes the songs are there but on the phone the Smart Playlist is there but when you select that Smart Playlist, it says NO CONTENT

The only work around is on Itunes Copy those songs on that smartlist and create a Regular Playlist called say

200 Never Rated Playlist. Then, in the Smartlist add the criterea Playlist is 200 Never Rates Playlist.

This will at least update your ratings and you can view an play through the playlist. Till APPLE FIXES IT of course!

I just looked for where my backup libraries were located. I did find the folder entitled MobileSync which had 2 folders inside that one. One folder had 6,600 files and the other folder had over 13,000 files! I am guessing over the years my phone was backing up just about everything it seems. How do I locate just the backed up iTunes library ONLY? Also I did read somewhere that a restored backup won't work on an older iOS which is stupid. My plan was just to restore a back up from a few weeks ago but I have since upgraded my iPhone to iOS 7.0.6.

I have 42 playlists and one of my playlists on my computer has 55 songs in it. When I look at that same playlist on my phone all of the sudden its saying I only have 21 songs in it!

Has anyone actually taken their device into an Apple store and had them look at it or consult you? If so, what are they saying?

There seem to be A LOT of bugs going on w synching since iOS7. I first noticed, that new playlists won't synch anymore (luckily, older playlists and albums will synch correctly). Then I noticed, that sometimes newly bought albums (on iTunes) won't synch, sometimes they will. If they don't, I can transfer them to the Phone by clicking on the "purchased" playlist (don't know if this is what it's called in english, am using a german version of iTunes on my macbook). Sometimes several of my covers will be jungled up after the sync, solution: rid all music of the phone, restart and try a fresh synch. Sometimes half of the playlists have the same cover. Sometimes iTunes only snychs half of the playlists. Synching is a lot slower than it used to be. .... (I could go on like this).

Cave: don't try creating a playlist you got in iTunes manually on your phone. I tried that, since often, when a list hadn't synched, the songs were on the phone under "title" anyway. After I recreated a list on the phone the original list on iTunes AND the list on the phone would be deleted with the next sync, even though I'd given the list on the phone a different name .... alls since iOS7 and the new iTunes. Support didn't find and answer either. Am thinking about changing to Samsung as well. I'd still use macbooks, I just love em too much, but an iPhone that won't sync correctly is of no use. Will have to buy songs via amazon then, I guess ...

Im wondering if you transfer the backed up files to a external drive that way when you sync the phone it won't change whatever is on the phone and that will become the new backup if that makes any sense. I am going to search the forums to see if anybody tried that.

Hi
I've tried many ways...as i know this problem is associated with album covers
i tried removing album covers using winamp in windows and removed all songs cover one by one then save them without cover
then i made a playlist in my mac and drag and drop them into playlist then surprisingly it transferred all of them into my iphone 5!

hope it helps

I went to an Apple Store and the tech told me that he thought many of the playlist problems could be solved if we bought iTunes Match. He said that Match would sync everything on the desktop to the cloud, and it would then show up on your iDevice.

I told him that most of my music files have special settings, such as volume and EQ settings that iTunes Match wouldn't sync. He said that Apple didn't really think about that.  iTunes Match was Apple's solution to people having many different kinds of MP3s and AAC files - Apple would just scan your library, give you Apple-AAC copies of everything you didn't already buy from them, and your music would be cloud managed, forever (for $25 a year).

Obviously, this is unacceptable to me.

We did discuss some workarounds to other problems-

1. Make sure to turn off the "show all music" options on your iDevices. That way, they will only show what is on the device, and not what can be accessed in the cloud. This might also help the sync problem where iTunes will assume you only want the cloud version pushed to your device.

1a. - he also said to turn off wifi while you sync with a cable, just to make double-sure.

2. Metadata. This has been mentioned probably thousands of times on this board. iTunes does not like metadata that it did not create. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It could be bad album cover art, bad symbols (like parenthesis or asterisks) in metadata, or anything. Change or fix the metadata.

3. Drop music in batches to test - this is going to be tedious, but if your sync keeps hanging up, it might be because of bad data in one of your songs. You might have to resort to manually dropping music on in groups to find the offending songs.

Hopefully this will help solve some problems, and alert Apple as well.