stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

One thing I'm noticing:

It's always my ripped songs that get "deleted" from my device (I put quotes there because they're not actually deleted; they become part of the yellow "Other" stripe).

If I replace my entire library of ripped songs, about 4,600 of them, with purchased versions from iTunes, the problem will be substantially solved.

I say "substantially" because many of my tunes aren't available on iTunes, some from very rare CD presses. Also, I'm not factoring in the audiobooks that may need replacing, since I can probably live without those.

So ... assuming about 75% of my songs are $1.29 each, and the rest 99¢ each, I can replace them all for about $5,635.

That's if my collection is average sized (I suspect it's actually below average), of course.

Additionally, there are maybe 10,000 of us with this problem, which means we represent a $56,000,000 windfall for Apple.

Hooray for Apple! Cha-CHING!

P.S. - I hope you all get what I'm actually saying here, because Apple's moderators are going to delete this post soon. If I spell out what I'm actually saying, the moderator bots will wipe it out almost immediately.

It might be the setting of your ripped songs it doesn't like (other people have complained about a couple files being corrupted that spoiled the whole sync thing for them)... Of my 16,000 or so songs, I have only about 300 songs or so bought from itunes... the rest I ripped in linux and converted using the lame mp3 encoder (with variable bitrate "-V 3" setting or on average 175kbps, joint stereo). I can say all songs are either itunes bought or encoded with lame (one of two versions.. I upgraded the encoder a few years ago)

The ONLY sync problem I have is that it can take up to 10 minutes to sync.

I only saw the 55gb "other" bar when I first upgraded to ios 7 & itunes 11.1, but did not have it since I wiped and factory restored about 4 or 5 times (that many due to other problems).

BTW, I have several smart playlists and a couple static playlists that I sync.

- Sync all songs from specific playlists

- all songs checked

- all playlists "live updating" (not like they do on the ios device)

- don't sync automatically

- don't wi-fi sync

I sync books, apps, and music, nothing else.

A few other settings/things that might have something to do with it (why my set up doesn't completely bork)...

- genius is off

- I do NOT itunes match

- I have all traces of icloud turned off on the phone AND in itunes where music and videos are concerned.

- IF I buy from itunes (very very rare), it's usually done in itunes and is pushed to the phone when most convenient.

- ALL MEDIA has artwork (some of my epub books I got from gutenberg.org don't)

- ALL music is rated

- ALL music is tagged (ID3 AND ID3v2)

My songs are pushed on the phone automatically through the smart playlists that I've tweaked over the years to represent top rated, least played, least recently played, and only what I normally want to hear (no haloween stuff in Jan...). Sort of like a "radio station"

I have the iphone 5.

.... Coming to think of it, I think part of the reason my phone takes forever to sync might be related to the phone going through looking to extract embedded artwork or possibly looking at ID3 tags. Has anyone tried deliberately corrupting an embedded artwork and syncing? Or putting songs that don't have tags at all?

Don't know if this has anything to do with it it, but I very rarely let my phone go below 50% (so I don't encounter the 30% "black screen of death" bug)... Hopefully when they resolve that I might be able to deep cycle the battery... but I'm going off topic here..

Hello all,

I found a solution that has worked for me; I hope that it can do the trick for you.

After I recently restored my phone due to the end of contract with AT&T, this was a requirement in order for it to registered as being unlocked I was told. Well after the Restore I decided to upgrade to iOS7, that was a week ago and I have probably restored my phone about 18 times since then, because it would become "hung up" after syncing all of my music (I have around 40gb I sync onto my phone). I would get frustrated, unplug my phone and next time I plug it in I would have over 10gb, 20gb, 30gb, of "other" data, this would start the whole process over again obviously of restoring.During a long sync again I stumbled into settings and saw that when iTunes was saying "Waiting for items to copy" the iPhone was saying "Syncing Artwork". So I immediately deleted all my Artwork, but I encourage you all to do the first step and see what your iPhone says it's doing before you delete the artwork, just in case you have something different.

First check to see what the phone is getting hung up doing, on your devices go into

Settings => General => iTunes Wi-Fi Sync

If you were like me, even though on iTunes it said "waiting for items to copy" on here it would have the very slow counter of "Syncing Artwork"

**NOTE** This is AFTER it is all done syncing the music, you will STILL be "Hung up" for some time right BEFORE it starts copying music and it will say "Waiting for items to copy" on both iTunes and the iPhone...

Well I'm pretty sure the way the new artwork shows up on the phone, this is doing more than just saving the files. Regardless, I could care less about artwork showing up on my phone. So obviously the next thing I did was deleting all of the artwork from iTunes, this can easily be done by.

Going into all your songs => Select All => File => Get Info => Yes to the Prompt => Click the box next to the white box for Artwork => Hit ok

Depending on the size of your library, this might take awhile.

Since doing this my syncs have gone well, I hope that it does the same for you.

Stage079 wrote:

Hello all,

I found a solution that has worked for me; I hope that it can do the trick for you.

Well I'm pretty sure the way the new artwork shows up on the phone, this is doing more than just saving the files. Regardless, I could care less about artwork showing up on my phone. So obviously the next thing I did was deleting all of the artwork from iTunes, this can easily be done by.

Going into all your songs => Select All => File => Get Info => Yes to the Prompt => Click the box next to the white box for Artwork => Hit ok

Depending on the size of your library, this might take awhile.

Since doing this my syncs have gone well, I hope that it does the same for you.

Thanks for this, Stage079.

But, as a huge favor, would you keep us updated if this does NOT solve your problem?

Obviously, if we continue to not hear from you, we'll know your solution worked and is long-lasting.

The reason I ask is that artwork DOES matter to me; it's part of the whole audio-visual experience, particularly for those of us who recall listening to CDs and LPs way back in the old days.

If this is the only way to guarantee the end of long syncs, I'll jump on the bandwagon. But only if it actually works for the long term.

I've personally nuked and rebuilt my library. It made me lose a few comments, a bit of artwork and ALL of my "date added" data. The long sync returned after just two weeks of peace. (It's a shame, too, because "date added" might've been useful for finding the media files that iTunes hates).

I'd rather not have to lose all my artwork only to have the same thing happen.

Again, if this does NOT work, long term, please let us know. Thanks much!

Thanks ExTech,

I will keep you updated, the syncs are still considerably longer than before I updated to iOS 7, this remedy has changed my sync from days to maybe 12 hours.

One of the most frusting items I believe is that if you don't go into you iPhone and look at the sync as I described you would think your phone is just "stuck" whereas at least by looking in your phone you have a counter and know your phone is transfering data. I believe that correcting iTunes to show this transfer would help ease a lot of users thoughts that the phone is simply "stuck"

Hopefully they take our words into consideration.

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I had this problem for too long, through numerous iTunes and iOS updates. If it's not this taking ages it's "waiting for items to sync" or whatever it was. I gave up. I couldn't wait days to send new music to my iPhone. I was wasting too much time so once my iPhone contract was up I switch to an Android phone instead.

I still however have my iPad which also has this problem. But once this eventually dies I'll have no problem buying another product now I know how much better it works.

It's sad because I really liked my iPhone and iOS. But music is too important for me and I'm too busy to fuss around waiting so long. My last sync was taking 13 hours before I decided to move on, and it hadn't finished yet either.

I have this problem constantly. Sometimes devices are not recognized; most all of the time I cannot sync music to my iPod. This all has started with the last couple of iTunes updates, or should I say downgrades?

iTunes has really become substandard software.

I think since Steve is no longer there, Apple people just don't give a rat's behind. If they did, this problem obviously affecting lots and lots of customers would have been solved by now.

I think I may have found something, i was having the same problem and then i restored my ipod from backup, but instead of having it sync all of my songs, i have it to sync only selected playlists, artists, etc. I have had this for a week or two on this settings and sync a few hundred songs every day and it doesn't stay stuck on the "waiting for changes to be applied" now. My library is over 10,000 songs so this was very annoying when it would get stuck, I also found on the internet that some were experiencing the problem only when they had the "sync only checked items" checked. I still have that feature on and it has been working for me, and it still says "waiting for changes..." but only for a few seconds and then it only syncs the newer songs, not all of them like it used to.

Hope this helps!

-V-

Thanks cpaulPHL

1) disabled "Find My iPhone" on the iCloud settings of my iPhone

I did this, synching went back to normal, then re-enabled "Find My iPhone" on the iCloud settings and the sync is still working fine.

Now if I could just get iTunes Match to work.....

This resolution seems really drastic, but I'm on the verge myself, after 30 years as apple user and defender. Without the ability to manage my music -- actually being prevented from accessing and updating -- all the other bells and whistles I can get on other phones and other platforms. Have you updated to the most recent itunes version? Got some temporary relief but it still doesn't address the underlying flaw.

This resolution seems really drastic, but I'm on the verge myself, after 30 years as apple user and defender. Without the ability to manage my music -- actually being prevented from accessing and updating -- all the other bells and whistles I can get on other phones and other platforms. Have you updated to the most recent itunes version? Got some temporary relief but it still doesn't address the underlying flaw.

Aye. It's just for me music is first and forthmost the feature I need most, making calls, taking photos, browsing the internet on a train, playing Free To Play games... that's all secondary.

I'm keeping my ear to the ground though. If one day there is a fix my next phone will be an iPhone once again.

13+ hour syncs just to add a single new album is not what I consider a good user experience. And I've emailed Apple about this, I've provided all the evidence they wanted in return to fix it. But each new update and the problem isn't fixed. Ah well! Android is alright! It's a nice temporary home.

What solved this for me, after long hours of banging my head against the wall. was to uncheck the Sync Movies and Sync Music and then performed a sync. After this, I rechecked these items to be synced again and it finally worked.