stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

Heh, I was hoping for something easier. Oh well, here goes nothing!

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.

Ok, I think I found a solution that will work for most people.

1) Plug in iPhone & have iTunes running

2) On your iPhone, go into iCound settings and turn off "Find My Phone"

3) In iTunes, check the box to backup to local computer, then backup

4) After done, Uncheck it and check backup to iCloud (but don't back up again to iCloud at this point)

5) Click sync and then it should be good.

6) Until apple figures this one out in the next update, I highly recomend not turning "Find My Phone" on. Or if you do, be prepared to do this process again. It happend to me.

Let me know if this worked for anyone.

Yes turning off Find My Phone seems to help. I tried every other suggestion that I found in this forum. Why that is the problem wt synching, I haven't the foggiest? I also will not risk charging my iphone into my computer, instead I use a lightening cord to a wall outlet. I synch only using WiFi, and will not risk causing another issue. Actually, I'm not entirelly sure if my computer is synching wt my ipod touch, but I'm almost afraid to check. This is something Apple really has to figure out the problem, and the solution too. The amount of threads in this forum is ridiculous, and if the problems solution is too only turn off find my phone, that's not a solution. I purchased my device, wt the understanding that the app Find My Phone, and the ability to synch would operate.

After wiping all my data off my phone I tried to do another sync tonight. It's now getting stuck sending Tones over. Thankfully I have 15 of them so I might be able to pin down the faulty file (if it is indeed that).

If you ever want to see where your files are getting stuck load up the Settings app>General>Wifi Sync. Even with a regular USB sync it will name the current file going over.

The frustration level for this issue is way too high for me. I'm deleting everything on my phone and will only use it to make and receive phone calls. When contract is up this iphone is going into the trash and I'll buy a nice dumb phone.

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.