stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

This one worked for me. Such a stupid problem, stupid amount of apparent causes, and stupid company that has lost touch with keeping their original key to mainstream success (ipod function) working. Apple computer, apple phone, 10,000 problems.

After waiting for changes to be applied to my iPad Mini for about 8 hours I exited iTunes. I wasn't eager to make the many changes that have been recommended in this thread all at once, so I decided to try one at a time. Although I was syncing via USB, when I went back into iTunes, the first and only change I made was disabling wireless synch and hooray, the full sync completed in about 20 minutes. In my case, the majority of purchases/changes were apps, not music files as so many others have stated. It's possible this issue may be with whatever uses the most storage on your device. Why this change worked, I have no clue, but I'm sure glad it did!

Mine has stopped working again. Last time I deleted that SQL database that someone mentioned, it worked after that (even though the first sync right after was a full one). But now we're back to 12 hour+ syncs.

Still no fix I see? I see iOS and iTunes updates but nothing to fix this.

I have also found that whilst I'm "waiting for changes to be applied" my iMac goes into power save mode, which stops the sync. I've had to go into system preferences and changed the display and sleep mode to never. I thought that seeing as iTunes was attempted to sync, it was a process, which should stop the system from shutting down. I might be digressing slightly here but was wondering if anyone else gets this, seeing as I've heard people talk about leaving it to sync for 12+ hours. Mine would go to sleep after 15mins and the sync would have stopped when I woke it back up again.

I'd strongly advise against permitting 12-hour syncs at all

You should never have to wait more than a minute or two for "Waiting for changes to be applied." Occasionally, that phase can last five minutes if there are a LOT of changes, but never hours and hours.

Now, of course, if you are copying a lot of media, a sync can take hours. But you'll see it happening (items get listed by name as they upload).

If media hasn't started VISIBLY copying over after a minute at most, I just cancel the sync and start it again

BTW, sometimes cancelling on the computer isn't sufficient - you have to cancel the sync in the general settings on the device as well, before you can re-initiate a new sync

And if you are copying a lot media, you'd do well to disable the computer's ability to go to sleep until it's done

Incidentally, I've been having pretty decent syncs since wiping out all my playlists and reloading them from plaintext exports. I've had a few seeming long-sync events, but I cancelled them before they could go too far and start disabling my media again

So I don't know if my problem's "fixed" per se. I do know that moving my contacts and calendars to iCloud has reduced my need to sync as often.

Last night at 1am I tried to copy over 4 new albums (60 tracks) and it got stuck waiting again. I deleted all the music off it, reset my device and told it to sync all my music across again.

13 hours later and it's still doing it. But I've found something new out; mine isn't getting stuck on corrupted songs (unless they all are). The sync is still taking place now and if I load up Settings>About. It says there are 4210 songs on my device but the capacity is full (as it should be). I can load up the device in iTunes and play any song from it, but if I try to play the music on the device itself I can only access those 4210 songs.

Each time I load up the About page it adds 1-2 new tracks. So they are still going over. There is a transfer taking place.

I don't think it's music that is going over as they're all playable from the phone when played through iTunes on the Mac. I think it must be something to do with the artwork, and that songs aren't playable until all their data is sent over.

[I work in Bootcamp so I can't actually do any work today because of this. I did the sync overnight believing it would be finished by now! I hate sounding dramatic but I'm at the point where I cannot manage an iDevice and work at the same time, one of them will have to go.]

Well this is just shocking now. All the previous tricks that used to work no longer work for me. Last night I wiped my phone and restored from an iCloud backup. This is usually the sure way of getting new music onto my device. 14 hours later and it has just about finished pulling all the data from iCloud/downloading apps. On the iTunes side it's now "waiting for items to copy" with no songs going over.

I have no idea what to do now. I'm inches from abandoning iOS altogether and migrating all my content over to another device, which will take time but at least I won't struggle just to add music to a phone. It has been 48 hours now. My bug report has had no reply from Apple since they asked for my sync log data.

48 hours without reply is unacceptable; try going to the top.

I wrote a respectful but concerned email to Tim Cook, including a link to this thread.

That got me in touch with an executive relations liaison and a senior tech who was able to answer a lot of questions.

I don't know that my problem's solved - I've had relatively stable syncs for a week now with a few exceptions ("Waiting for changes" taking more than 60 seconds, at which point I'd stop the sync, reboot the phone, and resync usually without problems").

Thanx cpaul your 11 step method seemed to work. I couldn't seem to find my iTunes App, on my ipod touch, so I'm not entirely sure if I had any itunes downloads to stop. In looking for the app, I did seem to find lot of apps whose updates hadn't finished downloading yet though.The problem was probably a bad voice memo. I had used thaat app previously, and had problems wt it. The problem may have also been in the find my device app. I turned it off, but it was a nice feature to have on in case of a lost device. What made you think it could be this app possibly causing a problem. Apple just really needs to fix those apps. BTW does anyone know of a good voice recording app, that they could reccommend, other then voice memo.

Thanks, I just did that. I'm a little disheartened that it has to come to emailing the boss, but if it gets my devices working as they should then it'll be worth it. At this stage I'll try anything.

After my last post I did a full restore and didn't load a backup, but it still didn't work. I never had that happen before! Usually wiping it works wonders. Until there is a fix I can't sync my phone to my iMac.

There's nothing wrong with "going to the boss" because this is (A) a serious problem for us and (B) a serious problem for Apple (as evidenced by the length of this thread and its number of hits)

By the way, I've done a full restore of my whole computer! That is, I've erased it, reformatted it as a new machine, and reloaded all the media from an external hard drive. STILL the problem emerged.

For me, it seems, it was a "bad playlist." Sounds funny, since a playlist is only an index giving song order, but replacing all my playlists from plaintext exports seems to have done the trick. There must've been something "unclean" in the iTunes library file.

I'm at eight days now with only occasional long syncs, all but one of which I was able to cancel without having my media disabled. The one time I did experience media disabling, I was able to reload them (all my purchased audiobooks) after only a few tries.

I'm not in the clear, in other words, but I'm better off than I've been in the seven months since iOS7 was first inflicted on us.

I don't know if this had anything to do with the problem, but some of my 3-star rated songs would show up in my 4-star rated playlists. I don't know when the problem started but in iTunes I had to fix it by using "songs withing 4-5 star range" when making Smart playlists.

I've rebuilt all my playlists and re-"set" the ratings by arranging my whole library by rating, selecting all 5-star songs and making them 5 stars, etc. Maybe that will do something?

I meant to say, on the last big wipe+clean sync it got stuck sending ringtones over. Since then I've wiped all metadata from them.

Fingers crossed!

The last 2 syncs mine was getting stuck on songs that had foreign characters in the artist field. The first one was a Japanese song, the second had a µ in it. I discovered this by going to Settings>General>Wifi Sync, it was the only place that mentioned the song name.

iTunes still says its "waiting for changes to be applied".

This was after a fresh restore on the iPhone, rebuilt all my playlists, group re-rated all songs (since some of my 3 star songs were thought to be 4 starred in Smart playlists). I'm now completley out of ideas 🙂

Hi all,

Same problem here. Before you go nuking everything, if you have time, let the "waiting for changes to be applied" spin for awhile. Mine eventually applied the changes and updated everything properly. I have an extremely large music library. It sounds like some folks have left it overnight and it STILL didn't work. For me, about 20 minutes did the trick and I'm up and running. Good luck to all.

Hi all,

Same problem here. Before you go nuking everything, if you have time, let the "waiting for changes to be applied" spin for awhile. Mine eventually applied the changes and updated everything properly. I have an extremely large music library. It sounds like some folks have left it overnight and it STILL didn't work. For me, about 20 minutes did the trick and I'm up and running. Good luck to all.