stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

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...)

poikkeus1 wrote:

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.

You might be able to find out what it's stuck on by going into Settings>General>Wifi Sync. Even when using a wired USB connection you can see what file it's currently transferring.

You're so right. As it happens, there was a problem with my iTunes library. Every iTunes library is a little different, so you just have to go hunting until you find the culprit. Restoring iTunes takes a while, but it fixes everything - or it should.

Well, after trying every suggestion in this thread, and after several tries with the "Waiting for changes to be applied" message staying there ALL #@!!! NIGHT LONG, I decided to smash up my iPad into small manageable pieces with a #17 ball peen hammer, and to then further reduce the thing in my Ninja blender, and finally to melt down the resulting powder and remold the melted plastic into a beany propeller. That way, on the off chance that some friend or relative should happen to give me a beany with a missing propeller, I would GET SOME USE OUT OF THIS ##!!!**##! IPAD!

But then... A SOLUTION!:

...accidentally discovered by trying a mix of various other suggestions. And I did NOT have to relocate or play with my library.

1. Do a full backup of your iPad by right clicking the iPad in iTunes and selecting "Backup."

2. When finished, unplug your iPad from your computer.

3. Uninstall iTunes completely (your library should be unaffected).

4. Reboot your computer.

5. Reinstall a clean version of iTunes from the Apple web site.

6. Run iTunes.

7. Reboot your iPad. (check Google if you don't know how.)

8. After it is finished rebooting, replug your iPad into your computer.

9. Do a Restore from the Backup you made way back in Step 1.

10.At this point, it shouldn't matter what you have checked or not checked, when you do a Sync it should work fairly quickly (but don't be impatient; the word fast is not in the iTunes vocabulary). Grab a soda or go to the bathroom. The next time you check your computer, the "Waiting for changes to blah blah blah" message should be gone, and your various things should be backing up.

11. When finished, unplug your iPad and exit iTunes (should be obvious).

12. If none of this works, your iTunes Library may be corrupted and you should smash up your iPad with a #17 ball peen hammer, and....

Tried everything in this thread....no luck. Finally found a fix of my own (just as I was about to resort to bashing the **** thing)....

While iphone is stuck on "waiting for changes to be applied", run a diagnostics test (help/run diagnostics/device sync tests). As soon as the test completes, things start happening! I have a 4s running ios7.1 on itunes 11.1

Nate

Well here's my latest:

Just made five weeks without a long sync that's actually disabled any media, although I've had a few that took a while (5-20 minutes) before actually uploading new media (ranging from a single song to a 5GB movie).

In those cases, the "waiting for changes" part took longer if the media was larger in size, which is about what one might expect.

This is the longest stretch I've gone without problems in the past eight months. So maybe my "fix" was indeed a fix (removing a bad playlist by exporting them all to plaintext, then importing them again). We'll see.

Of course, a big factor was my move to iCloud. I now sync maybe once every two days, where I used to sync at least twice an hour.

After 5 months of this problem with iOS 7 on and iPhone 5 and Mac OSX 10.9.2 and iTunes 11, it has been fixed.

The update today for iOS fixed the issue. I got stuck at the same screen that I've seen a million times and threw it to the background. After a few minutes I magically had music again. Then ran it again and it was supper fast.

I have tried everything on these forums and the only thing that worked was this update.

What is the number of the update? I am installing 7.1.1. right now, but it doesn't mention the "waiting for changes to be applied" bug. Then again, maybe they don't wish to acknowledge it exists! Will see how it goes because I'm trying another sync tonight to update music and playlists.

It finished after 6 hours and now it takes around 5 minutes to do a sync that transfers no new items. A definite and vast improvement but not as fast as it used to be. I hope we continue to see improvements.

I did find a temporary fix too. If I didn't sync "Entire music library" but clicked "selected..." instead and then ticked every genre, it woudld. Not perfectly but faster than 18 hours.

jimmirock wrote:

It finished after 6 hours and now it takes around 5 minutes to do a sync that transfers no new items. A definite and vast improvement but not as fast as it used to be. I hope we continue to see improvements.

I did find a temporary fix too. If I didn't sync "Entire music library" but clicked "selected..." instead and then ticked every genre, it woudld. Not perfectly but faster than 18 hours.

As an alternative, you might try this strategy that seems to work more or less OK for me....

Create a smart playlist that has one rule "media kind = music" (called something like "all music"), then, as you indicated above, don't automatically sync music, but instead go and in the music tab, select that playlist (in other words, try syncing a playlist rather than genres. Since that playlist is all inclusive, if you end up getting a new song that is not in one of the already selected genres, it will still show up automatically).

If you decide later you have some music videos and want them on the phone too you could edit the playlist and add a "or media kind = music videos" rule. The same playlist can then be used for other interesting controls over what goes on the phone... You may choose to rate the songs and add a rule to the smart playlist so everything 3 stars and above are included... If you get tired of a song, you could rate it down to two and it will automatically disappear the next time you sync.. setting the song back to 3 or higher will put it back on... and you can also add some other clauses like "song not listened in the last X days".

That's a strategy similar to what I use. In part because my 64gig phone is short by about 20gig for just the music alone (I can live without my music videos on my phone, but it would be nice to have the space for them too....) so I have several static playlists that represent songs/albums I'm willing to live without and the stuff I want to keep is a smart playlist that states "all music minus those playlists I can live without". I then have several smart playlists that selectively choose from those base playlists and creates a sort of "radio station" that picks from the entire library. Ultimately, I tell itunes to sync the playlist that is "always on phone", along with those daily use playlists. Every time I sync my phone (about once a day), it will end up swapping out 20 songs or so. On any given day, the phone maintains about 10,500 songs (with some room left over for apps and a bit of breathing room for other things). Much of my music stays, but some of which will appear and disappear based on my plays.

The sync time for me ends up usually lasting about 5 - 10 minutes when the playlists are out of sync (between itunes and phone). If they are in sync, the process is usually done within 15 seconds.

Overall, this strategy works ok, but I would prefer if the phone had the capacity to hold it all AND it was able to sync like it did in ios 6 (done in less than a minute).

I should also add, I have TURNED OFF in both itunes and on the phone, the options that go back to the cloud for music or videos.

I was able to select all genres and sync, which meant all the songs uploaded but none of the playlists

THat's how I was able to confirm that a playlist might've been at fault

After exporting and reimporting all my playlists, I've had relatively reasonable syncs for several weeks now

It's still not fixed as of iTunes 11.1.5.5 and iOS 7.1.1. I got stuck at "waiting for changes to be applied" for over 2 hours on April 30th. I left my phone to sync and went outside for a walk. Came back over an hour later and nothing had changed. However, there may be a simple solution to this....

So here's some additional information about my situation which may help everyone:

I run iTunes 11.1.5.5 on 2 separate Windows computers. My "master" computer, which has all my 68,000 song library on an outboard 2TB drive, is a new Windows 8.1 machine. This is the first bit which may be of importance - I just bought this computer 3 months ago, and transferred my library from a different outboard drive to the new 2TB drive I bought with this computer. I was previously running iTunes 10.7 on a Windows XP machine with this library. I think copying the library from the old HDD to the new one may have corrupted a few song files. So remember this for later....

My second computer "the slave", is running Windows 7 Pro SP1 with iTunes 11.1.5.5 also. This is the same computer I've always used to sync all my iPhones. I have a 5S 64GB, a 5c 32GB, and a 3Gs 32GB. I've never had a problem syncing any of these phones with this computer. Why? Because I select songs one by one from my "master" library and transfer them over to the "slave" library, which only has about 3,200 of my 68,000. I've noticed over the years as I've done this, I've found a few songs that were corrupted - meaning the metadata of the song had disappeared. iTunes would still play the song (mp3), but Windows Media Player would not. I think this is significant, meaning the latest versions of iTunes and iOS may be having a problem syncing corrupted song files, even though iTunes will play those songs. I arrived at this theory because I tried to sync my phone with my "master" computer library, by selecting only the songs that had already been synced from the slave library. It synced those same songs from my master library with no problem, because, I think, those are "proven" song files with no corruption. So I tried to sync again, adding additional songs from my master library directly to the phone, and it stuck at "waiting for changes..." for the 2 hours mentioned above. So I wiped all the songs from the phone and re-synced it with my slave library, and it synced fine. "Waiting for changes" only took about 10 seconds, then it started copying the songs. I did this twice with the same result. Again, I think that's significant.

So my conclusion from this is that I'll continue to run two separate databases, and only sync my phones with the smaller one, with the "proven" song files. HOWEVER... APPLE also needs to do their part, and EXPLAIN this to their customers. If I am right, at the very least there should be some kind of message that pops up in iTunes that says "Some of the songs could not be synced because the files are corrupted" and it would be more helpful if iTunes could indicate which songs are the problem! I remember when I first started using iTunes about 6 years ago, the early versions wouldn't even populate corrupted song files. (I know this because I also run Windows Media Player as a cross-check of my database - WMP will populate a corrupted file, but will not display the song data and will not play it.) So Apple went from one extreme to the other, by now populating and playing ALL songs, but just not syncing them, (having us all stuck at "Waiting for changes") and not telling us what is the problem. ARE YOU LISTENING, APPLE???