stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

hz6,

Glad to hear it's working. I noticed you're seeing duplicates:

Now I'm still having a few duplicate songs with dotted circles on the phone, let's hope they won't cause future issues.

I'm seein the same thing, only they're recent purchases that I've changed in some way (i.e., added album art, lyrics, changed genre, etc.). They now show up in iTunes as "streaming." I don't think they should cause problems; they haven't for me, at least.

But, like you, I remain insecure about them being there. Still, I just hit 9 days without a long sync, so they don't seem to be causing too much grief.

One upside: to reduce the time of the inevitable long syncs, I've made a lot of tough choices about what songs I actually want on my phone. I have it down to about 2,400, which cuts the long syncs down to 30 minutes or so. But I'm actually having an easier time navigating my playlists now with fewer songs on the device.

Still, what a waste of all that iPhone memory (that we paid so much money to have!)!.

Well, no "other" stripe ... yesterday.

Today's long sync resulted in a 8GB "Other" stripe from all the music still on the device but no longer readable.

I'm back on the phone with tech support tomorrow. And every day that this happens. Guess until a journalist suffers our fate, it's up to us to be the "squeaky wheels."

By the way, yesterday's long sync seemed to have no cause, but today's more catastrophic long sync seemed to result some time after I activated WiFi syncing and immediately after I downloaded a couple podcasts

Anyone else experience a connection with podcasts? I've noticed an occasional correlation of long-syncs with podcasts, but nothing firm.

Added to which, I tried to avoid ANY connection by converting all my podcasts to AAC files, then converting those to m4b audiobooks. The versions going onto the phone are NOT the downloaded versions.

Then again, iOS 7 seems to HATE audiobooks, because they ALL get nuked during these long syncs. As do all my non-purchased movies.

Well, I was hopefull the 'transfer purchases' first suggesstion would work. All purchases were transfered, although to where who knows. When I ran the sync with no music selected, it barfed again getting stuck on 'preparing to sync'. Let it run for about 2 hours and gave up. I really don't know what it is trying to sync.

Maybe this is Apples attempt to 'persuade' all to quit using iTunes and pay for the storage to use their 'cloud'.

I'm so surprised Wired magazine or someone hasn't picked this up and run it as "the death of Apple"....

ExTech,

I have definitely had problems with synching of podcasts, when encountering synch problems I usually lose podcasts that I have already downloaded - try playing one and it just comes up with Podcast Unavailable or similar message, and it have to remove and re download. Hard to tell if this is symptom or one of many causes. I do know that IOS7 is struggling with synching podcasts to multiple devices because it's a nightmare for me but no idea if it's related

My synch is currently working (touch wood) since I (a) did a transfer purchases and (b) removed a DVD rip that I was synching to my iPod Touch. For how long, who can say?

My guess is that IOS7 is very vulnerable to any file format that it thinks is valid but for some reason isn't, given the variety of different files that people find as a cause for this problem... For me a movie, someone else voice memos, someone else a music track etc. one things for sure, it never used to be like this

NB My old IOS5 iPod Touch works a treat... Except it too gets problems with podcasts which are shared across devices which leads me to suspect this is a separate issue.

I know that most of these posts were put up a little while ago
But.

I too had a similar problem and an "error" message (waiting for changes to be applied)
- my thoughts were:
Something to do with update to IOS 7.4
Corruption

Itunes software issue

After a LOT of research, I found a simple step that solved this issue for me.
I had been running my sync (pre - IOS 7.4) as automatic - see the options section under the summary tab (This can be view when you click on your device - right up the top you'll see tabs
SUMMARY / INFO / APPS / TONES / MUSIC / MOVIES / TV SHOWS / BOOKS / PHOTOS etc.

I changed my selection to manually manage music and videos and tried another sync
Wha La!
It began to copy over 700 songs that had not properly synced to my Ipad 2
BONUS: it then started to sync my videos again.
Hope this helps somebody.
It certainly made my life less frustrating

Downside: I have to MANUALLY manage - but it's better than all the hassles
🙂

NB: I don't know why this error occurs and I'm not sure this fix will work for everyone's issues but it can't hurt.

BUMP! I've been using iTunes since my iPhone 3G without this sort of problem. I've always manually managed my media and can't even drag files over to my 5s without this stupid hang up. Before anybody asks...YES, I have tried every possible configuration! I even rebuilt my library. This is crazy! The worst part is not a single response from apple??

Why won't my iphone/ipad synch properly? Why doesn't iTunes Match match to my mobil devices? Where are the Apple tech guys? Are they all in marketing today?

Without iTunes as the repository and synch bridge to all my stuff, all the ipads and iphones in the world are a waste of money. iTunes is the cornerstone of Apple's huge success over the past decade. Without it Apple is just another motorola/dell swimming about the red ocean of tech gear. As early adopters of all things Apple -- 1st macintosh, pods, phones, airs pads minis and through numerous 'Gs' and OS for all these, as well as a buyer of imacs and macbook pros for four companies now -- I'm now ready to break bad. Without the ability to synch my library of songs and photos and docs et al quickly and seamlessly, it's all just a waste. iCloud seemed to be the next awesome thing, but maybe now a culprit, I can't say. And I'm appalled that this army of users can't get a definitive answer from Apple on how to fix these synch issues, all of which seem to emanate again from iTunes and from the looks of it are not some fatal flaw in the user. Moreover, iTunes Match -- another great idea gone bad -- simply stopped working; I just cancelled it. Most appalling is how many people like me are out there scrolling through user forums trying to find solutions to problems we didn't create. This should never have been allowed to happen: I'm feeling like I'm just trudging along as part of a pack of zombies.

What's everyone's time worth? Call it what you will: deceptive advertising, bait and switch, theft (all my tunes/movies/and all -- ripped and/or bought) lemon law, scam -- the result is that my very valuable and expensive stuff is unavailable or unmanageable. One more chance to make it right? Don't know Apple, you tell me.

I've been on this thread for about a month and nothing anyone has suggested has ever worked; however, I just upgraded to the latest release of iTunes, 11.1.4.62. It mentions nothing about the sync issue but ever since that patch, I've been able to sync twice with no problems. I'll try my other iPhone 5S a couple of times and see what happens.

Anyone else have similar luck?

Here is the patch fix notes:

This version of iTunes improves accessibility, including better support for closed captions and subtitles. This update also adds the ability to see your Wish List while viewing your iTunes library, improves support for Arabic and Hebrew, and includes additional stability improvements.

Pretty much over it, Hate having to restore my iphone everyday just to add a couple of songs to my playlist or add a movie. this entire week i spent the entire day tryin to update and sync my iphone to itunes, tried every troubleshoot on here and restoring my iphone seems to be the only the way i can get it to actually sync. two days I had to go to work with no media files on my phone because it takes to long to actually go through this process day in and day out. I Tunes has wasted enough of my time, most likely switching to a Galaxy Note once my moneys right.

Hey Edimon,

Nope, beein running that version of iTunes since it came out. All these problems are occurring for me under that exact version.

Meantime, I'm collecting quite a number of direct extensions to senior Apple techs, each one generating an engineering request when they can't help me (which they never can). So we at least know there are at least a few actual Apple engineers with this problem on their to-do lists.

Edimon wrote:

I've been on this thread for about a month and nothing anyone has suggested has ever worked; however, I just upgraded to the latest release of iTunes, 11.1.4.62. It mentions nothing about the sync issue but ever since that patch, I've been able to sync twice with no problems. I'll try my other iPhone 5S a couple of times and see what happens.

Anyone else have similar luck?

Here is the patch fix notes:

This version of iTunes improves accessibility, including better support for closed captions and subtitles. This update also adds the ability to see your Wish List while viewing your iTunes library, improves support for Arabic and Hebrew, and includes additional stability improvements.

Selecting "Manually Manage" allowed me to sync after an hour+ of trying other suggestions. I also selected sync over WiFi and unchecked almost every other useless feature on iTunes 11 from auto sync to cloud backup.

Seems to be working and at a regular pace.

Someone needs to be fired over this. I wish Steve Jobs would have successfully imbeded his spirit into an AI quantim computer before his passing, rest his soul.

I don't understand the problems here. It's pretty simple:

1. Turn off automatic sync

2. Before each sync, power your phone off and on again, and reboot your Mac

3. Start sync manually

4. Be patient. Syncing just takes an hour or two longer than you might expect.

5. Voila, it Just Works.

Sure, iTunes 11 is a little slower and makes shopping, music playback and podcast management a bit harder, but at least it has some new fonts.

Thank you Jeshua Smith!!

Something FINALLY worked for me!!

Jeshua Smith wrote:

Based on gr8yt's response, here's what finally worked for me:

1. Stop any current sync

2. From the View menu, select "Show Sidebar" if you don't have the sidbar already

3. Right click on the iPhone, and select "Transfer Purchases". After a minute it copied a podcast, and then it started syncing my music.

I've long noticed an irregular correlation between long-syncs and my podcasts.

That might be why all the audiobooks go away during the long-syncs; they share similar features with podcasts so maybe they have the same hidden problems.

In any case, all this "transfer purchases" talk (which has never worked for me, by the way), got me thinking that maybe I should try syncing my podcasts. I'd only been loading & unloading them on and from the iPhone, never the computer.

That could perhaps be resulting in the same issue that enables the "transfer purchases" solution to work. Podcasts present only on the phone are registering as purchases that need to be transferred, and (still inexplicably) cause the long-sync.

I'll give it a try and report back. I'm able to go nearly 24-36 hours between long-syncs now. I never, ever thought that I'd be grateful, but it beats long-syncing during every, single sync.

Nope.

Syncing podcasts resulted in a long-sync almost the first time I did it.

Well, at least I know to avoid podcasts.

Still the price I paid may be too high - I have not been able to initiate any media transfer for over an hour, despite many many attempts.

This may be it