stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

For what it's worth - having this issue with an iPad Mini - just turning off 'find my iPad' in iCloud and then resyncing seemed to solve everything. It's simple and worth a try for others.

The more I read, it's no wonder Apple can't fix the problem. EVERYTHING causes it!

not good enough apple , different day different problem, usually centred around itunes

Wow, this issue caused a lot of pain and I wasted several hours on it. Hard to tell from the many posts what's the root cause, in my case it started after accidentally enabling some iCloud feature, when I usually back up to my PC.

I got things to work after many very frustrating tries. What I did was to switch to "Manually manage music and video" in the "Summary" menu of my iPhone 5. In manual mode, I was able to delete the music entries on the phone with the dotted circles, in iTunes. After deleting some duplicate entries in my PC music library, and turning the "Manually manage..." check box on and off multiple times, it eventually cleared up - almost. Now I'm still having a few duplicate songs with dotted circles on the phone, let's hope they won't cause future issues.

Apple, please put out a fix for this very serious bug, the worst I've seen since I own an iPhone.

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 think you're right, JTF1972, everything does cause this and no one thing fixes it.

I guess I could spend four days and nights and try every suggestion mentioned in this thread but I would just lose four days and still have an anti-syncing experience.

Why does the customer have to be the engineer? Isn't that Apple's job?

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!)!.

Good point ExTech, I did the same thing, almost all of my iTunes library entries are changed (sort order, composer name, artwork, etc.). To be honest, I consider it unacceptable software quality to see so many mistakes being made by the software that manages my music library. Some examples:

• Wrong sort order of albums, sometimes correct in iTunes, incorrect on the iPhone, sometimes the other way round. Changing the "Sorting" fields only helps sometimes.
• Art work displays correctly in iTunes, but is missing on the iPhone.
• Duplicate entries that I can't remove, or more precise, that come back after I delete them.
• The last title does not show up in the iPhone when I view albums in the horizontal format as tiles. When I resize (e.g. from two to three tiles high), it suddenly shows, and stays even when I go back to the original size.

All these things seem to fix themselves over time, but sometimes come back after several months.

If I wanted buggy software I could probably pick many less expensive solutions.

Unacceptable indeed - I can't believe there's STILL no fix after 18 pages of comments and 87,000 views on this one problem!

hz6 wrote:

I consider it unacceptable software quality to see so many mistakes being made by the software that manages my music library. Some examples:

• Wrong sort order of albums, sometimes correct in iTunes, incorrect on the iPhone, sometimes the other way round. Changing the "Sorting" fields only helps sometimes.
• Art work displays correctly in iTunes, but is missing on the iPhone.
• Duplicate entries that I can't remove, or more precise, that come back after I delete them.
• The last title does not show up in the iPhone when I view albums in the horizontal format as tiles. When I resize (e.g. from two to three tiles high), it suddenly shows, and stays even when I go back to the original size.

I just made it ten days, personally, but this latest long sync is a doozy. Wiped out nearly all of my non-purchased songs, and I'm still holding my breath to see if I wind up with a HUGE yellow "Other" stripe from the songs still on the device but no longer recognized.

I've personally experienced everything you've just mentioned. The tiles thing has never really worked for me. The other things I've managed to fix by wiping the phone and restoring from backup (don't you just HATE that?).

I'm trying to keep my spirits up, but this is really stretching on a long time. I wish some prominent bloggers would get wind of it. But it really does annoy me that Apple could be so non-responsive. Getting-things-done was Cook's famous talent, and it's the one thing Apple is apparently not doing under his reign.

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.