Q: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update

Since updating to IOS 7.1 my Iphone 4s is always freezing while syncing, and since updating from IOS 6 to IOS 7 , most of the songs will have exclamation mark on it and couldnt be played. However, my 4th gen IPOD  still using IOS 5 and has zero problem with syncing.

Clearly it has nothing to do with deleted songs in my computer since I've tried once by putting all the mp3 in one freakin folder and re sync it to my Iphone and during second sync, most of the songs has exclamation mark again and cant be played! Guess what, I dont even move or delete a single mp3 from that folder! and these problem dont exist on my 4th gen IPOD that still using IOS 5

nyc-dem wrote:

 

After trying to take Zelous' advice and making matters worse, I forked out the $19 and got help from Apple Support.

what advise of mine did u follow? ive posted a lot in this forum. the latest advise i posted was the delete library and scan for media to refresh all library links to music. did u get a lot of duplicates?

Zelous that is how I have always had my iTunes set up to only sync songs that were checked. I have not found a solution as of yet. I have not downloaded any music from iTunes Store in months. The last time I did, it wouldn't sync however when I did a search on my phone for the downloaded songs, I was able to locate them and manually add them to the playlist of my choice. Now when I hooked up my phone to the computer via the USB cable, it would remove those songs! Not only those songs but others as well.

I just wonder why this issue doesn't seem to be a widespread issue among iPhone users. I have an iPod Touch that has 5.0.1 on it and it still syncs.

I have noticed in the iTunes preferences, the box that is supposed to say where your iTunes music folder is located is sometimes empty from time to time and I have to click browse and select it again. My entire library is on my external drive but I think I have music on my desktops hard drive, just how much might be on there I am not sure.

Has anyone tried any 3rd party software to get the syncing to work? I also thought about checking the box for manually syncing music.

that sounds like theres a number of things that could be wrong with ur system. let me post what i did to fix mine to maybe help out.

my music wasnt syncing properly so i did the first thing that i know of. i deleted my music library and scanned my computer for it again. with that i got a lot of duplicates. this told me that i have multiple copies of my songs on the computer. i found out that had happened because i was downloading music outside of itunes and adding them to my itunes and my itunes had the preference on to create copies of the music added to the library and send it to the itunes media folder all organized like. once i found out what was happening i hunted down all music that was outside of the itunes media folder and got rid of it. deleted library and scanned again. still had some duplicates. this was caused, i found out, because of the first time i scanned for media it added my music AGAIN to the itunes folder. i then used the "show duplicates" option in the itunes program and multiselected all duplicates i could find. i then hit the delete button and chose the option to move files to trash can. this got rid of all of the rest of the duplicates in both my itunes library and the files themselves. after that i deleted library again and scanned one more time (i didnt need to but i like to be thorough). no new problems came up and the show duplicates option didnt bring anything up.

after i went through that process i created an iphone playlist and i am now able to sync any changes i make to the playlist every time i plug my phone in. i have never used the check or uncheck song option for syncing. i always just go to the phone's syncing options and choose entire library or select playlists and artists or genres. i do not use wifi syncing anymore as that has proven unreliable. i also set my itunes default media folder to my 64gb flashdrive. i made the mistake once of trying to play music on my computer when the flashdrive wasnt plugged in and that caused all kinds of problems so i would advise being careful if u choose to use the external drive or flashdrive choice to store ur itunes media.

I started having problems adding new songs to my iPhone 5 and for me this is what worked:

I erased my whole list of songs from itunes and then readded the songs. Hope it helps. I also check marked the "copy songs to itunes library" in the preferences.

Zelous,

You touched on something that I noticed within my library a while back but never did anything about it. I noticed I have several iTunes Media folders where I have all my music however I have directed to the one particular external drive where I know my music is. Now there have been times when I go into the iTunes preferences and I noticed the box that tells you where you want your music stored will be empty. So when I open iTunes I would see an exclamation point next to every song. That would happen also if my external drive falls asleep and I didn't wake it up before opening iTunes I would get the same thing. Once I fix the issue, my library is back to normal without the next to the songs.

Now since I noticed more than iTunes library folder, I am most likely going to follow what you said about locating all my songs and deleting duplicatesand all that and see if I notice a change.

I wouldn't be surprised if I have music on my system drive when that box in the preferences goes empty. iTunes needs to save the song some where iguess. I need to figure out what is making that box go empty from time to time on its own. (iTunes Media Folder location)

I will add that even though I said I have more than one iTunes Media Folder with the same name, there is only 1 of those folders on the drive I have iTunes directed too so I can probably rule out that iTunes is getting confused which folder to store my music in.

I have some research to do.

Another thing I noticed too is the option in the iTunes Store where you can re-download music you already purchased. I had a bunch of songs that iTunes kept saying wasn't in my library but they were in there!

With that said, I will try to do what you suggested and delete some stuff and then have iTunes scan for my music and then delete the other iTunes Media folder on my other drive with the same name or I will just change the name on the drive.

Hi everyone. I'm a long follower of this thread. I've definitely made my anger known. That said I think I may have solved my problem but i'm looking into it. I've basically had to RECREATE all of my playlists that were pre itunes 11. I think the only thing I have not done is start my library from scratch. I did create a new library and import the old one via the XML which saved all the playlists.

For the record if people are reading this i've wiped my phone, recreated my library, deleted DB files off of the phone and none of that worked. This seems to have done something.

For example I have a 500 track smart playlist that is updated based on most recent additions. It looks like after I deleted and recreated this list I was able to sync it successfully. Simply duplicating the list didn't work. It seems my static lists are okay for the most part but i'm still investigating.

I'll update more later. All that said apple still needs to address this. This is obvious some sort of bug.

DVX100Shooter wrote:

 

Zelous,

 

 

Another thing I noticed too is the option in the iTunes Store where you can re-download music you already purchased. I had a bunch of songs that iTunes kept saying wasn't in my library but they were in there!

 

ive noticed that with the more and more music i get the more itunes will have that problem even after i get my library working the way its suppose to. that one seems to be another glitch in the system that could be addressed with a proper update hopefully. im still waiting on that one.

important that you do this. for sure.

it's absolutely true that this ridiculous workaround is effective. 

this specifically: "I took someone's advice on putting auto-lock to never and removing my passcode to make it easier on the syncing process"

then: "Don't forget to double-press the home button and close down all running apps before trying again if you have the issue"

you can then restore your passcode and auto-lock settings after the sync has completed itself.

Nightmare to have to bother executing these workarounds at all. APPLE WAKE UP and pay mind to these forums. HEAR THE PEOPLE.

All the solution is BS because its the problem/bug within the IOS. If my IPOD 4th gen does NOT have this problem but my Iphone 4s with latest IOS does, then its certainly the problem within the latets IOS.

I asked about song cant be played and has exclamation mark on it and some people suggested its because I've moved the song in another folder while in reality I did nothing! all 5000 songs on my Iphone and IPOD are being stored in my HD on one folder and stays there forever and Itunes just cant sync it properly. When I sync my IPOD that still using IOS 5, nothing goes wrong but with this IOS 6 and 7, it has been freezing all the time, sometimes its working but quarter of the songs will have exclamation mark beside it and cant be played.

ok here are some details of what i observed just now on my Apple 4 running latest IOS

(1) added some new music files to some of my itunes playlists

(2) i noticed that the ending free memory was getting low (< 1GB)

(3) deleted some older music files from some playlists

(4) re-sync'ed itunes to my Apple 4

(5) itunes complained that there is not enough memory to do the sync. this is funny since there wasnt any complained BEFORE i deleted some music files from my playlists. it should have been happier since i tried to create more space in my iphone.

SO,

(1) i uncheck the "Sync Music" box and then re-sync itunes to iphone hoping to free up very large space and in the process clear out playlist corruption, if any.

(2) after re-sync itunes to iphone without any music sync at all, the result is funny: (a) the amount of freed up memory is smaller than i expected, (b) itunes indicates that there is still about 5 GB of audio on my iphone

(3) so, i went to music player (ipod) on my iphone and check.

(4) there is no one playlist at all

(5) there are lots of songs ready to be downloaded from the cloud (without cloud icon next to each song)

(6) tried to re-sync itunes to iphone with "sync music" box unchecked and the results were the same

(7) tried to do hard reset on iphone and then re-sync. tne result was the same and i am getting very frustrated

SO,

(1) now i cannot add new playlist to the iphone because my iphone still has more than 5 GB of songs, if i tried to add new playlist then itunes will complain that i dont have enough memory

APPLE,

(1) why does this happen?

(2) If i forced the itunes to sync without any music files, then iphone should NOT have any music file at all.

Any solution? or will Apple recommend the elaborate uninstalling itunes, recreating library, recreating playlist, reloading iphone software, etc, bla bla bla?

"Any solution? or will Apple recommend the elaborate uninstalling itunes, recreating library, recreating playlist, reloading iphone software, etc, bla bla bla?" ----> sadly that's their only solution.

disgruntled7788 wrote:

 

ok here are some details of what i observed just now on my Apple 4 running latest IOS

 

(1) added some new music files to some of my itunes playlists

(2) i noticed that the ending free memory was getting low (< 1GB)

(3) deleted some older music files from some playlists

(4) re-sync'ed itunes to my Apple 4

(5) itunes complained that there is not enough memory to do the sync. this is funny since there wasnt any complained BEFORE i deleted some music files from my playlists. it should have been happier since i tried to create more space in my iphone.

 

SO,

(1) i uncheck the "Sync Music" box and then re-sync itunes to iphone hoping to free up very large space and in the process clear out playlist corruption, if any.

(2) after re-sync itunes to iphone without any music sync at all, the result is funny: (a) the amount of freed up memory is smaller than i expected, (b) itunes indicates that there is still about 5 GB of audio on my iphone

(3) so, i went to music player (ipod) on my iphone and check.

(4) there is no one playlist at all

(5) there are lots of songs ready to be downloaded from the cloud (without cloud icon next to each song)

(6) tried to re-sync itunes to iphone with "sync music" box unchecked and the results were the same

(7) tried to do hard reset on iphone and then re-sync. tne result was the same and i am getting very frustrated

 

SO,

(1) now i cannot add new playlist to the iphone because my iphone still has more than 5 GB of songs, if i tried to add new playlist then itunes will complain that i dont have enough memory

 

APPLE,

(1) why does this happen?

(2) If i forced the itunes to sync without any music files, then iphone should NOT have any music file at all.

 

Any solution? or will Apple recommend the elaborate uninstalling itunes, recreating library, recreating playlist, reloading iphone software, etc, bla bla bla?

my best advice for that is to restore the iphone as new. if u unsynced ur music and there is still that much music on ur device there is only 2 reasons that could happen. either all that music was downloaded straight to the device itself, which means unsyncing music that wasnt synced in the first place would not take it off. or ur device has a glitch in the software thats not letting go of that music. the first one is highly unlikely and the second one can be fixed by restoring the device and setting it up as new.

Rattlehead18 wrote:

 

"Any solution? or will Apple recommend the elaborate uninstalling itunes, recreating library, recreating playlist, reloading iphone software, etc, bla bla bla?" ----> sadly that's their only solution.

did u expect a magic fix it button? when something goes wrong with complicated software u have to work on it to get it fixed. troubleshooting is the keyword here i believe. thats the whole point to these forums in the first place.

^^^ yet most solution seems to involve a magic button which is "reset iphone as new"