stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

I'm going to have to get a different phone too. I don't want to, I really like iOS but I can't get around this bug.

Can't even get an iPod because this bug affects all my iOS devices.

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Update to my situation: it eventually got past tones and managed to sync 2090 songs (out of 12,000) after a 10 hour overnight sync. Everything I do to try and fix this seems to make it worse.

I agree with everyone who say it's getting worse with every release.

current itunes with ios 7.0.6 would take about 2 minutes to sync 15-20 songs on average.. (ios 6 would take about 15-30 seconds)

Now it takes on average 10 minutes for the same number of songs, even fewer. Nothing else changed but the ios version. I'm still using the same media, same playlists, same itunes, same computer, same everything.

After the initial upgrade from 7.0.6 to 7.1.0, I let the thing putz away for about 20 minutes syncing before I decided it was screwed, so I factory wiped and reinstalled as recommended when you upgrade the os. When it went through its motions and copied everything back on (my 10,000 songs @ 55gb), I unplugged it and noticed it had zero songs. When I plugged it back in it told me it had 55 gb stuff in "other" and it was over capacity by about 50gb.... The files were copied but the database that points to them was not updated.

Another wipe/reintsall, this time I interrupted it after loading the ios and before it restored my settings/stuff. After a bit of finagling, I got it to restore everything but the music.... Then spent another 3 hours spoon feeding batches of songs, with reboots of the phone and the computer between each cycle, just to be 100% sure it would be at its best.

I noticed that the more songs already on the phone and the more songs to copy on the phone for that sync, increased the sync time. It was quite fast at the start when I had 1000 songs and I was doubling it to 2000, but when I went from 9000 to 10,000, the sync time was excrutiatingly painful....

The notion that playlists or media or bad images are the cause of the thing borking the sync is sidestepping the real problem... There are edge cases that are not being properly handled causing race conditions or exceptions that are not gracefully caught. Regardless of corrupted media or perhaps circular playlist references, the environment must be able to trap on them and tell the user... e.g. "Unable to sync this song because it is corrupted", or "Unable to sync these playlists because of a circular reference".... and assuming those are not at play, if a and b are waiting for each other to act next, that's a race condition and it can be caused by many things, but again, a condition not gracefully handled.

I've only got 2 ideas left, trying one out now.

1- Rebuild iTunes library. Delete the itunes .itl file, put the .xml file somewhere safe. Open iTunes, import the .xml file. I've noticed my old library had TV shows in the Home Movies folder despite all the metadata displaying the correct info (consolidating library didn't fix it), but the new library has now put these files in the Home Movies section on iTunes. I wonder if these "bad files" are caused by library structures, since one of my songs that it got stuck on had a foreign character in it? Anywho, I duplicated my library and I'm playing with it now. Once I've given it a tidy up I'll try a sync and report back.

2- Syncing under Windows 7/Bootcamp. Same library by using MacDrive.

3- Regular OSX sync but with all album art removed.

That's all I have until Apple decide to look into it.

I've rebuilt from an XML import without solving the problem. It's possible that playlist corruption survived in active x

My playlists were individually exported as plain text files and imported as such. So far, I've had no real problems in just under two weeks.

The tech people actually suggested manually reconstructing each playlist, and that was going to be my next step.

bottom line, though, in my case I was not able to identify any bad files. In fact, I was able to sync my whole library without issue as long as I had zero playlists.

Still, even now, there's one song that has to be re-copied at the end of each sync. And if I replace or delete that one song, a different song takes its place. So something strange is still going on.

BTW, I currently cancel sync if "waiting for changes" exceeds 20 seconds. The only time I'll let it go longer is if there are a LOT of changes (e.g., a 5GB movie or the equivalent in music files). Otherwise, I cancel sync on the computer AND separately on the device.

Sometimes, afterwards, everything on the iPhone will appear as "Other" until and unless I reboot the phone.

Hah, oops, I meant 3 ideas.

Same as you Extech my imported library didn't work either. I duplicated my library though so I can play around with it. Gonna try removing all album art and playlists (one by one). But the fact ringtones are hanging as well makes me think it's more than just those 2 areas.

Right, I forgot to mention, I also suspected my ringtones so I removed them.

Last week, I finally added them back after about a dozen "safe" syncs. No problems yet.

My ringtones include "official" iTunes-generated m4r files (where you had to select 30 seconds and send that clip back to Apple for conversion) and homemade files (where I just changed the m4a extension to m4r). So far, they've not been a problem.

But honestly, my biggest step forward has been to move to iCloud. I synced so often because of my calendars, usually once an hour or so. Now I only have to sync once every few days.

It blows a bit, because I was able to upload prior events to iCal, giving me a continuous calendar dating back to 1/1/00. Now I keep no more than a year at a time on my devices and computer. The old entries are in a separate user account on my computer.

i've had this problem ever since updating to 7.1. every time i sync my iPod is now a 2 hour nightmare that involves an average of at least 4 full restores until everything transfers like it's supposed to. this is awful.

I'm on Windows. My screen looks exactly the same except right underneath where it says "Forget all remotes" I have another section with a button that says "Reset Sync History".

Why would the different OSes have different settings?

I think OSX eventually wiped out this option. Figures.

Meantime, here's my own update: I had a problematic sync that went too long while trying to add a single 1GB movie.

Luckily, I'd been syncing an earlier phone with an identical setup, so I took a few hours and restored the current phone from the earlier phone's backup.

So the solution seems to be: prepare for the worst.

Ah cheers, gave it a quick try and nothing. There's actually no way of doing this in Mavericks too! Apparently there's no need, but considering it fixed it for you I think the need might be returning!

I've had problems with this since october last year. I think i've made some headway with this. At some point today i randomly had a clean sync out of the blue. I deleted a few of my unwanted videos to save space. Tried syncing again and nada. 'Waiting for changes to be applied'. After many restarts of my phone and itunes and a browse on other topics of this nature someone suggested the 'File > sync' and i remembered about transferring purchases. So i stopped my phone from syncing and went up to file, then device and transfer purchase history. Soon as i clicked that my songs started to sync. I think it has something to do with accounts on the purchased songs.

Hope this helps anyone!

I've tried several of the strategies suggested in these posts. None of them worked. I am running on a PC laptop and I have no videos or photos attached to my iphone 4s; it's songs and audiobooks only. What finally worked for me is I manually scrolled through the thousands of songs and found two items that had ! next to them, signifying that the original file could not be located or whatever. I deleted those two items. I synched my phone and it updated without stalling for the first time in about three months.

Any other media on the new device? Movies maybe?

Seems to be a media problem for most of us; either a bad file or bad playlist

I'm chugging along, with the occasional long sync but no rampant disabling of music already loaded

A big part though is my switch to iCloud, which has lowered my need to sync as often

I just had the same problem. The only thing that fixed it, on my machine, was to reset my iPod Touch, and restore from the backup on my iMac. However, "waiting for changes to be applied" can refer to just about anything.

I use it primarly for photos, apps and browsing. No music or video content at all. I tried to remove all my photos but since the sync was taking so long and iOS cannot remove photos like it can with music, I had to load up one of those iOS device browsers and manually remove the photo directories. I haven't tried a sync since.

(I have noticed that the latest iTunes update has sped up the time it took for my iTunes library to be 'converted' when it booted up, since I use the exact same library for both OSX and Windows. So it appears they are trying to fix some of the other recently introduced problems! Now for this one...)