stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

Everything was fine until I went from 7.0.2 to 7.0.4, now I'm having the same problem.

I performed the update via the PC, and successfully synched before I kicked off the update.

iTunes 11.1.3.8, Win7 x64, iPhone 4S 64GB

NOTHING WORKS....... NOW I CAN NOT EVEN BACKUP MY IPAD AIR, LET ALONE GET IT TO SYNC PROPERLY....

APPLE - ARE YOU LISTENING???????? HOW PEOPLE HAVE TO ASK FOR HELP ?????

IPAD AIR 128G, 7.0.4

IMAC 10.9

ITUNES 11.1.3 64BIT

Sorry hllbnd, but you're dead wrong on several levels:

(1) 5-10 minutes is already too long for a sync

(2) it was Steve Jobs' stated vision that Apple products be the center of our digital lives. ALL photos, songs, movies, and other media were specifically intended by Jobs to be easily accessible

(3) this problem dates back years; it's only recently that enough of us are angry enough to make this big a thread on the topic

Thanks WirelesDJ for setting up the survey

I have no doubt it will help unless Apple truly has gone all John Sculley again (last time I almost gave up on Apple was when they produced the Performa series)

One thing: we should be able to check multiple items for iOS and possibly every answer.

Personally, I've had this problem over multiple iterations of iTunes, MacOS systems, and iOS devices, with iOS versions 6 and 7 (and probably earlier).

I actually have resolved this problem but it was not easy.

First I deleted all playlists off my iphone. I think the problem is coming from "on-the-go" playlists (created on phone) and playlists created on the computer - Apple still seems to have a big architectural problem with this.

I unclicked "sync music" and hit the sync button. The "music" usage bar would disappear in the iphone usage meter at the bottom of itunes...

but it would still get stuck on "waiting for changes..." then after a minute or two the "sync music" box WOULD CHECK ITSELF and the "Music" usage bar would fill up again.

I did this over and over. Then I noticed that gradually some music was unsyncing.

I kept unclicking the sync music button and clicking sync until finally, finally all the music disappeared off my iphone. This took over 10 different attempts to unsync - wait - unsync - took well over 30 minutes.

Finally when all music was off my phone, I then selected the playlists that had been created on my computer and synced them.

Since then it's been working perfectly.

NEVER CREATE PLAYLISTS ON YOUR PHONE

I was stuck in the same wait loop for my iPhone, here's what I found as a SOLUTION:

- with the device connected, select the device in iTunes

- go to the Summary Page

- uncheck "Automatically sync when this ... is connected"

- I had "Sync ... over Wi-Fi" selected, I unchecked that too

- click Done

- answer "Apply" to pop up.

- sync wait stopped immediately

- recheck the unchecked options and Apply again

- turn on big smile on face

I have an iPhone 5 / iOS 7.0.4 / iTunes 11.1.3.8. Over the past 2 or 3 months iTunes has increasingly hung when I attempt to Sync my phone after making small changes in the playlists I am trying to include on my phone. It gets stuck on "Waiting for changes to be applied." After waiting for 10 - 12 minutes for some indication the Sync will proceed, I close down iTunes and (eventually) completely turn off my iPhone and attempt the syncronization again.

In my experience, two or three attempts will eventually result in iTunes re-installing all 1,300 - 1,400 songs on my phone. From start to aggravating finish, the whole process may take 30 - 40 minutes. And all I'm trying to to do is take 6 or 7 playlists off the phone and replace them with 6 or 7 others. A half hour ago I attempted to delete a 64-song playlist (Bach's "Christmas Cantata"), which sounds simple. But even the deletion of a single playlist required more than a half hour of "Waiting for changes to be applied", closing down iTunes, shutting down and re-starting my iPhone.

This seems astonishing, because this bug has now become routine, whereas it was comparatively rare in my first seven years of iTunes use (with iTouch, iPad, and iPhone devices). To be sure, I must sync my iPhone more frequently than I did my earlier devices. Still, the most recent versions if iOS and iTunes seem much more vulnerable to this irritating problem than earlier versions. (My current iPhone is over a year old, so I don't think it is the villain in this piece.)

I feel your pain, brmlburt - your situation is almost exactly what I've been experiencing.

What's especially aggravating is having to endure a long sync after I've made ZERO changes to my music and playlists. At a certain point, iTunes just decides to pull off 1,700 or so songs and reload them again.

Currently, my "fix" is to upgrade to an iPhone 5s with AppleCare.

In all seriousness, while I haven't had a long sync since upgrading (3 days ago), I know it's only a matter of time.

So when it inevitably happens again, I'm going down to the Genius Bar every single day until it's fixed. Which may just mean going every single day for two years. But at least we'll have laid a clear record of problems and attempted fixes.

I was able to duplicate the problem on my brand new iPhone 5s, so I'm at the Genius Bar every day from now until the problem's solved. Or until Applecare runs out in two years. Probably until Applecare runs out.

By the way, I've reviewed this thread and can say that I've personally tried out every "fix" mentioned on this thread, including the painful ones. None of them worked for more than two weeks. Most only work for a few days. Rebuilding my entire iTunes library did work, but only for 12 days.

STILL isn't fixed Apple! How many months has it been?

I haven't had a successful sync in months and my iPhone has none of the songs I PAID FOR. Great work to your QA department, you hiring people from Microsoft now?

If your goal is to drive people to buying other phones, then you deserve a pat on the back. Otherwise every one of your coders deserves something else that involves a boot and their posteriors which is clearly where their brains are located.

The 1st technique from the 1st page seems to help but only if I manually transfer up to 50 songs max at the time.... so now having done the 2 techniques I am trying again to automatically sync just one of my playlist. Its very frustrating as it's been 30 mins now that my phone is stuck on "waiting for changes to be applied" when I only have 3GB on it... anyways what a pain

brmlburt,

I deleted my entire library AND xml, prepared to rebuild all my playlists from scratch and reload all my songs from a separate drive...

... BUT ...

something occurred to me while reviewing the settings. I'd had the checkbox checked for synchronizing playback information across devices.

That'd mean that whenever I played songs, iTunes might try to match playback information for the same songs on other devices. Maybe that info is what's causing you (and me) to experience loss-and-reloading of so many songs.

I'm currently rebuilding my library from TimeMachine backups, so I have nothing to report yet, but if you haven't gone as extreme a route as I have, you may want to give it a shot.

I think it's among the "advanced" preferences, but I can't be sure and I can't boot up iTunes at the moment.

Success! I followed AlexInMtl 's solution posted in this thread 14-Dec-2013 7:47 AM

(Not the first time today, I did reboot the phone and started iTunes (I monitored the processes) just before I executed AlexInMtl steps:

- with the device connected, select the device in iTunes

- go to the Summary Page

- uncheck "Automatically sync when this ... is connected" <-- I already had this unchecked

- I had "Sync ... over Wi-Fi" selected, I unchecked that too <-- I unchecked this one

- click Done <-- I think I just had <Apply>, not <Done>

- answer "Apply" to pop up.<-- ignored this one

- sync wait stopped immediately <-- My sync sarted and stopped immediately, like under one second. Idle.

- recheck the unchecked options and Apply again <-- Instead of editing options, I was staring at a <Sync> button, so I pressed...

- turn on big smile on face <-- me too it worked ! - Backup happened, followed by contacts sync etc, then apps...

Yay! Merci Alex!

By the way, I'm running XP, iOS7.0.2, iTunes 11.1.0.126. I don't have playlists, nor iCloud.

Though I wasted hours today (and less, just a few days ago during an earlier attempt), my results did motivate me to sign-up into this Apple Support Community to post my findings to share with you in this discussion thread.

So I've had that issue the other day combined with lots of GB in "others" that I couldnt get rid of. Like I said before, I have followed the 2 techniques on the 1st page, but I still struggled to put my music on my phone: I'm talking 3 hours to put 3gb, doing 50 songs at the time, my computer was stuck on "preparing to install" for ages before finally doing it. If I tried to send my entire playlist in one go, I was back to square one: stuck on "waiting for changes to be applied". So eventually my 501 songs where on the phone but I had 1GB in "others". Having a little 8GB that was too much. So I followed a third technique to rid of "other" that say to go in Settings-General-Usage-Music then delete it and straight away restart the phone. It worked but suddenly my music randomly disappears ??

So anyways this morning I restored the phone from Itunes, and tried again without using any methods and it worked straight away, my little 3GB of music where on the phone in 5mins. So I don't know what happened, unless Apple fixed the issue over night. Good luck everyone !!

Thanks, MacGyverRick. Sounded promising, but your fix still does not work (for me). After following it, I just tried to delete two now-completed audio books from my iPhone 5 to make room for one or two unread audio books. Twice so far iTunes has hung after reaching "Waiting for changes to be applied." Bear in mind, I am only deleting two comparatively short files from my phone. I am not ADDING anything (yet). Even after totally shutting down and then rebooting my iPhone (after the first "Waiting for changes to be applied" hang -- 15 minutes worth), closing iTunes, re-opening iTunes, again connecting my iPhone, and attempting for a second time to delete the two audio books, iTunes hung again at "Waiting for changes to be applied."

All I wanted to do before going to lunch was to uninstall already-read books and install an unread audio book. It has so far required 40 minutes AND I HAVEN'T EVEN MANAGED TO DELETE THE TWO ALREADY-READ BOOKS. I believe, based on past experience, if I leave my iPhone connected and return to my PC in an hour or two the playlists, photos, audio books, etc., will be loaded and totally re-synced. But, hey, I need my iPhone to make, you know, phone calls. I cannot see having my phone linked to my PC for hours at a time just so I can swap out one already-read book to replace it with an unread book. 250GB of data on my PC's hard drive backs up faster than this.