stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

I forgot to add Apple TV to the list of devices that are hanging up over this synch failure. I've tried most of the fixed mentioned here, and still to no avail.

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.

No joy here.

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

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..

ya. new mini pad, and i went to add a movie. this is the second time i have had to do a restore.... COME ON APPLE>.....

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.