stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

After not being able to sync any photos or music since sometime in October, and having tried everything else, I followed the advice to delete all music and then go in using iExplore and delete the SQLite DB file.

On the positive side, this fixed my photo syncing (well, it's been five days and it's still letting me sync new photos), but music is still borked. It synced about half my songs, and the rest now just show a cloud (if they were purchased on iTunes) or the circle with a square otherwise. When the sync gets to the point where it should transfer music to my iPhone, it shows that it's transferring a few (but always says "1 of ..." even for multiple) and then says "Cancelling Sync...".

I really think Apple needs to step back and fix bugs in their existing products before they launch the Next Big Thing. We all know iTunes has become a disaster. Likewise for iPhoto, which used to be reason alone to buy a Mac and is now so bugridden as to be almost useless. Not to mention IMAP mail not working right in Mavericks four months after release, Compressor broken in Mavericks, Logic crashing all the time. Yikes!

chiahyena wrote:

Someone please help I was on the phone with apple tech support for over 2 hours and they couldn't help me finally said it was a hardware problem which I knew it wasn't took it back to best buy got different one same issue waiting for changes to be applied step 5 of 5

Well it's not hardware if that's any consolation. If it's anything like mine (and others'), then your iTunes doesn't like some of its media.

Until there's a fix, try syncing only checked songs & videos, then uncheck everything, and try checking off songs in chunks, starting with purchased songs.

thank you for this pointer - the duplicate tone - I've spent ages trying to get sync to copy the tracks over to the iPhone - removed the tones I'd added recently, and bingo we have movement - what a relief!

I don't recommend restoring unless nothing else works.

I've restored and rebuilt my phone, iTunes library and eventually my entire computer after an erase-&-restore.

Some of that may work for you; none of it worked for me, though, but it was all a major hassle

Pfffff! I CAN NOT believe this problem is back again! 😠 I wanted to quickly add a few (ripped) songs today to my iPhone and strangely found that they hadn't been synced to any playlist on my phone.

So I checked that indeed the songs were correctly added to the appropriate iTunes playlists and I synced again, then it got stuck on the infamous "waiting for changes to be applied! 😠

First it showed below in the bar which displays free memory capacity all yellow with the word "other" written through it, and now it's showing "over capacity by 7GB."

However, the good news (at least I f*cking hope!) that after 5-6 tries, this time it IS syncing after leaving it plugged into my laptop for about 10 minutes, although it's completely adding ALL my playlists again!

p.s. I have not changed any settings in iTunes, nor have I deleted or unchecked any music libraries or playlists.

APPLE SORT THIS OUT ONCE AND FOR ALL! It's ridiculous that the average (layman) user has to check various forums all the time after every 'update' to know whether or not it's safe to sync his/her iPhone!

It's unbelievable how bad this is now. Plugged in my iPod today (I have now turned off wifi sync) so that I could pick up 3 new tracks. It executes a sync. Success. If you define succes as not transferring any songs... but it did it quickly! Asked it to sync again. Waiting for changes... and waiting...

Stopped the sync, closed iTunes and reopened. Plugged in iPod. Waiting for changes... I wandered off to get breakfast and come back to find it is copying song 2500 of 5358! yes it is reloading everything

I guess I'm lucky as this takes what an hour? Whereas some of you guys are seeing 12 or more...

So bored of messing around with something which used to work seamlessly and effortlessly with my old iPod Touch (IN FACT IT STILL DOES!)

I had a similar experience like ShedMan. Eventually it worked, after it re-synced my complete library taking roughly an hour or so.

Well, one thing's for sure: I'm not syncing anything for the time being. 😐

p.s. a few pointers for the Apple (cough cough) Geniusses who made this forum to make this place far more user-friendly;

*) why do I have to log in every time again?

*) why doesn't it (after I logged in again) then automatically jump back to the last page/discussion I was watching and I wanted to comment on? (bloody annooooooying!)

*) Why doesn't the spelling check work? (it works on just about every other field, except on an Apple related field, a bit embarrassing, no?)

*) when I click on a link in the email notification that someone has replied on a discussion I'm following, why doesn't a link automatically take me to the newest message after my last visit, instead of taking me to the very beginning of the thread every time? I know what was written before, I just want to watch the new content...

*) after I click "post" then it does the same annoying thing: it takes me back to the very beginning of the thread, instead of to my post so I can have a look at it.

I'm done trying my old ipod works flawlessly the new iPod touch has no music on it the step 5 of 5 never goes away!! Apple support could get my bought music on it which is like 4 cds not worth the headache might just return ipod to best buy and go with old one for the time being. Extremely mad at apple for not addressing this I have a iphone 5 s a ipad and not 1 issue with these but this ipod won't sync are we the only ones with this issue ? My friend got his same day I did not 1 problem ??? Go figure shame on you apple FIX THE PROBLEM

I just installed iTunes 11.1.5.5 <Downloaded Mar. 2, 2014> on my Windows 8.1 PC. It took a while (as seems custormary these days) and required a reboot. The good news is that--

(a) iTunes immediately recognized my iPhone 5. (The previous installation of an iTunes update required a 2-hour search through discussion groups to learn which aspect of iTunes and / or my Windows OS had to be tweaked so that iTunes would recognize any of my iDevices.); and

(b) Removing a book from my iPhone and placing 22 new songs on the iPhone in two separate syncronizations was routine and handled with dispatch. In other words, the first two attempts to add and delete items from my iPhone worked exactly as was ordinarily the case before this past fall, when "Waiting for changes to be applied" got to be a routine and long-lasting part of virtually every sync.

I devoutly hope the latest version of iTunes is more robust than the previous two versions, which dramatically slowed the syncronization of my iDevices whenever I tried to change their contents.

Thanks fremont_guy, I'll have to try this if my current "fix" doesn't take.

I've been on the horn with a senior engineer several times now, and his dept. "confirmed" it's media, specifically a bad song or movie that iTunes doesn't like. That's all it takes to throw off an entire sync.

I'm trying various approaches to find the guilty song; someone posted earlier one approach that worked. It involved moving them onto the device in clumps until a bad sync occurred. Problem is, the process can take weeks because it's intermittent.

That said, I've been syncing all my media on my wife's MacBook and a separate iPhone 5. So far, it's been flawless over repeated syncs.

The only difference: the new computer runs Mavericks (so the iPhone must sync a lot of its stuff over iCloud)

Are any of you experiencing this problem in Mavericks?

I've been resisting the upgrade because my teaching business depends on software that hasn't been Mavericks-tested.

But I'm ready to chance it if it'll fix this horrible long-sync problem.

ExTech wrote:

I've been on the horn with a senior engineer several times now, and his dept. "confirmed" it's media, specifically a bad song or movie that iTunes doesn't like. That's all it takes to throw off an entire sync.

The next time you're on the phone (or anybody else is) with one of the senior engineers, maybe you can point them to this message... I think this could be quite relevant.

I made a rather interesting observation that may be part of the problem, if it is not close to one of several root causes...

I synchronize smart playlists that are based on "not played in the last n days" so as long as I don't play any songs, when I JUST synced the phone, the next sync takes seconds (about 10, maybe 15 seconds), but if I do play a song, it can take several minutes to do its thing.

I have a playlist "always on the phone" and another "could be on the phone" ("could be" is simple playlist I add/remove, but "always" is a smart playlist that is "not in could be, and not in several others", so adding to "could be" instantly transfers from always to could be)...

I have several smart playlists that take "always on the phone" and "could be on the phone" and creates a set of playlists I use all the time that are dependent on "not played in the past so many days"..

I sync "always on the phone" and the final output playlists. Therefore, some songs always stay on and some songs get removed once played, and some others get added (it would simplify my life so much if they put out a 128gb phone, but...).

When that playlist has NOT changed and I sync, I can see a message on the phone itself just before the sync finishes, briefly stating "copying 1 of 1 : <some song here>"... (in my case right now, it's "on the borg ship"... from star trek TNG "best of both worlds" sound track, which is on the "could be on the phone" list)

Sync/resync, it still states the same song so it's got to do with some specific list order at that moment...

When I play that song in itunes that causes my playlists to change and that song to no longer be on the phone, sync the phone, then sync several more times, that "copying 1 of 1" states a different song... (other songs from the same album at that point)... When I finally exhausted those songs from that playlist, the song it states was one from chopin which is on my "always on the phone" list.

I have a very sneaky suspicion that there might be zero offset vs one offset or possibly a (song < count) vs a (song <= count) thing going on, causing an "index out of bounds" problem or a "let's do it again" kind of condition... At issue might be it's going too far and trying to process invalid memory... Or, if it is not, for some people, the way it syncs the phone causes the phone to try to figure out if it needs to recopy media. In the right condition, it could be attempting to copy many many files.

I also noticed when I put the phone in airplay mode, it saw the phone with all 55gb used of the 57gb available in the "other" category. I just about had a heart attack when that happened. Certain perceived network connectivity errors between itunes and ios could explain why some people might see their "other" category balloon beyond the phone capacity... if itunes thinks the song is not on the phone for example by way of it being in the other category and it wants to copy it again, and itunes to ios communication is still good but it gets in that mode it could say "song, not on phone, so here's another copy".. compound that from time to time and you blow all available space. Luckily, when I took it out of airplane mode and synced again, it finally came back and didn't have to wipe/reload.

The playlist funkiness has been going on since, I think, the iOS 6 update.

Just FYI, I used to have playlists that had silent tracks between songs. The silent track was 20 minutes long and duplicated as many times as necessary (i.e., there was only one "silent track" in my entire library, although it could be repeated within a given playlist many times).

I noticed that the playlists stopped working in order sometime around iOS 6. There were also problems with live updated smart playlists like yours showing up different in the device.

I'm betting you're right though, in thinking they're linked.

Meantime: UPDATE: Mavericks made no difference. I just duplicated the long-sync after 12 hours and roughly 25 syncs, on a different computer using a different iPhone and using iCloud to sync calendars, contacts and bookmarks. In other words, different from my actual setup in every way.

The only two factors in common: the same song files (which, I'm told, include a "poison pill" I'm still trying to track down) and PODCASTS.

The newest long-sync occurred after I added the Podcast app.

I think this may have to do with podcasts being media files that get added, rather than anything special about the podcast apps or podcasts in general.

The consistent problem we all seem to have is with adding/subtracting files from the device.

FYI, my latest attempt will be to sync my backup phone, one genre at a time until the problem emerges.

For what it's worth, I'm noticing that the syncs spend almost no time on "waiting for changes" for the first two small genres I'm trying, so it does look like this approach may be fruitful.

I'll keep this thread apprised. More to come...

Hi jonathansc & chiahyena,

how often do you sync the ipods? I've noticed it's something of a crap-shoot, where you run the risk more the more often you sync.

Also, do either of your ipods download from the internet, or do they only get their songs from iTunes?

I just this morning began to suspect that my two phones (and iPad and iPad mini) are downloading without my permission, and this is hanging things up.

Several other posters have noticed download issues being a possible cause.

thanks and best of luck!

ExTech wrote:

I've noticed it's something of a crap-shoot, where you run the risk more the more often you sync.

I think it's a setting/condition that triggers the failing sync more than anything...

I sync my phone pretty much every day and the only delay or stupidity I experience is about a 3 or 4 minute sync, most of the time it's stuck @ the 'waiting for changes" part (but that hardly ever lasts more than 2 minutes)... At that point it copies the 10 or 20 songs that are needed and finishes within seconds of completing that.

I only have books (epubs, pdf and and one or two from itunes) and my music (not even music videos) which is ONLY synced via about 10 playlists (some smart, some static). No movies, no tv shows, no podcasts.

As I noticed the other day, the 'waiting for changes' bit is pretty much not there when the phone and itunes have the same playlists. But even then it still insists on re-copying one song that was already there... I would be interested to know if that means it ends up copying that song again as a separate song and creates a duplicate on the ios (which would lead to a growing "other" category) or if it overwrites the one that was there.

I very seldom sync my phone unless I played music in itunes and need to update the playlist or I played on my phone and need to bring those plays back into itunes..... and that almost daily sync has been happening for me for 2 1/2 months.