stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

My post was just removed by apple.inc because it was considered speculative, and not asking or answering a question. I've read comments saying apple 'does not' read this forum. Well apple.inc removed my post. Alright here is my question. Why do so many different users, have problems when they have installed Yosemite, but not all? Also why are there 36 pages of posts, and why are the problems all so different in nature, even when a clean install was done? No speculation at all in this post.

I had this same issue, but on Windows with iTunes 12 and my spanking new iPhone 6 128GB. I tried every solution I could find to sync my music, but it constantly stuck on waiting for changes to be applied, or if it got to the next stage it would sit there forever saying copying song 1 of x. The thing that finally appears to have fixed this is using MP3Val to check all my MP3 files (http://mp3val.sourceforge.net). It found a fair number that had garbage at the end of the file, especially podcasts for some reason, but after fixing them all my sync is now working and I'm happy again!

Hope this helps, as it took me a fair number of tries to find a solution that worked for me.

I appreciate so many posters providing suggestions for how to fix this problem. I am pretty frustrated with Apple right now. They need to fix this issue (please fix Handoff too!)

My iPhone 6 and iPad Air 2 and MBP 2014 are all running iOS8/Yosemite. I get my iPhone syncing again... it works for a few days... and then the problem pops up again.

I wonder if Sonos is doing something to mess up my music library. Any of you with this problem use Sonos? Sonos acts weird sometimes.

Tim Cook is only interested in making money unlike Steve Jobs who actually cares. This problem has been bugging iTunes since 2007. No answer from Apple. Nice for people to suggest solutions. But this problem is temperamental. It just comes and goes. So, if you think something you did solved hour problem, think again. As for me, I am not going to try anything else until Apple recognize this as an issue with iTunes.

What complete and utter nonsense. I've spent the past 7 days, one to six hours per day, trying to get my music library on to my new iPhone 6+. I've done four hard resets of the phone, at least ten "restore" sequences on the iPhone, and close to 100 attempts at sync. Once I was able to get a few GB of music across! I was all excited, until I tried to get another playlist on. All this on the latest and greatest version of iOS, up-to-date Yosemite on the Mac, and iTunes 12. I'm so frustrated that I'm this close to pitching my $950 phone out of the window.

This isn't a phone issue. It's an iOS and Yosemite and iTunes issue. I was having the same problem trying to backup my iPhone 4s (latest and greatest versions of everything) and get some more music onto it.

Apple, get your head out of your iOS and fix this. Or you'll be losing the people that spend thousands of dollars on your stuff every year, as I do. Sync is broken and what good is this pretty brick unless I can get my music on it?

The only thing that works for me is to delete the music from my iPhone 6+ (settings/general/usage) and resync all of my music. Its stupid, and its a pain but it is the only thing that works, and it works every time.

iOS8.1, iTunes 12, Yosemite 10.10.1 (and before, so it's not just the fault of the 'buggy beta version'). Finally had to wipe out everything on my iPad Air 1/128GB after restoring the iPad from backup multiple times over the last couple of months (over two hours per session), and reinstall everything. Syncing finally got it so screwed up that it had a 56GB "Other" pile of stuff on it that wouldn't go away even if I turned off syncing of everything and had iTunes erase everything. Reinstalled a bunch of apps OK, but then went to add music and iTunes has been "(not responding)" for an hour at "Waiting for changes to be applied". The cursor is also the spinning pizza of death when over iTunes. I guess the stupid programmers have never heard of watchdog timers. The spinning sync indicator on the iPad was on for a while, but it has now given up. No music made it over to the iPad.

Force quit iTunes, wrote a nasty note in the comments section telling them to read this thread, restarted iTunes, it still had the playlists selected from last session, and it seems to be syncing OK. Geeze I wish they would fix this, or at least tell us which song/book/movie/app that is causing the trouble, if that's what it even is.

Yeah, my iPhone ended up with a 20 GB "Other" and the Apple support document basically says it's our fault for disconnecting the device in the middle of a sync. Like I should just cancel all my appointments and sit around the house all day waiting for some 8-hour sync (to add five songs) to complete.

iTunes really needs to have more smarts. If there are some orphaned files, it should recognize that and clean it up. Likewise, if there's some song that's keeping the sync from working, it needs to skip it and alert us to the problem.

To get rid of the 20 GB "Other" I recently restored my phone, and am now trying to restore the content. I saw all my photos copied over in the iTunes status window, yet still, 48 hours later, half my Events (completely out of order since iOS 8!) say "0 from my Mac". So where'd they all go?

What a disaster! Every time they bump the iTunes version number, I get my hopes up that they really fixed it, but again the changes seem to be mainly cosmetic. If Apple's Health app were monitoring my blood pressure, they'd already know how angry I am about all this.

That's a good point. I'm not sure apps are the problem for me, but it's just like on your Mac, or just about any OS, programs can't be running while you try to update them. That could be part of this. Good catch.

ejoshowitz wrote:

I had the same problem and i just figured it out. CLOSE OUT ALL APPS ON PHONE before syncing and it will sync like a charm. Tried several times with this method and it worked for me

I sync my phone every day so I developed a bit of a sense for when a long sync is too long.

While my problems never involved a sync that was stuck overnight, for the most part syncing would take about 5 to 10 minutes, not often more than 15 minutes. Somewhat rarely (about 3 or 4 times in a year) stuck for up to 5 hours, I did notice that closing all the apps would sometimes speed up the sync, but for me, not often enough to say it's cause and effect.

Granted, I don't have very many apps on the phone, so it might not really apply to me. It might be for you that an app has a resource open that is preventing the sync from advancing.

Now that I think about it, I believe it was in ios 7 that apple introduced the idea that an application could run in the background. It may be that certain badly written apps open a resource when you are using it, but won't release it right away, thinking it might need it again. If they are set to run in the background, they might not close it unless they are forced to exit and won't exit if allowed to run in the background. You may want to try going into settings -> general -> background app refresh and flick off the "background app refresh" control before you sync (you could turn it back on after the sync, and hopefully individual on/off settings would be kept as they were).

If that works just as well without manually closing them all individually, you might be able to leave the "background app refresh" on and do the divide & conquer method to find which one..

(keep a list of which ones you have enabled beforehand for easy reference)

toggle the first half of the apps OFF and try a sync (re-enable afterwards)

toggle the second half of the apps OFF and try a sync (re-enable afterwards)

If it's only in one of the two halves, you should notice which one.. the faster sync will show which set is causing the problems

If you can identify which half is causing problems, repeat the above with each half of the half in question (so in the second round you're turning off 1/4 of the apps at a time). If you can keep narrowing it down like that, you might find it fairly quickly.

I have also seen the "unable to reproduce" problem that might fail to fail immediately afterwards. You might need to do a bit of sleuthing, and possibly run each app for a bit of time between syncs.

I followed your instructions and was unable to complete a successful sync. I decided to erase my phone and restore it. It was not successful. I erased my phone and set it up as a new phone. Still having the same problem

I have an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1, iMac with OS X.9.5, iTunes 12.0.1.26 and had the same problem. Sync stuck on waiting for changes and I noticed hat my denon audio player showed no music on my phone. Every time I tried to add music it would be stuck on waiting to copy files. I reboot my computer, reboot the iPhone and connected. Still stuck. I deleted the denon music player and reinstalled. I unselected all of my music in the library (try holding down option + command when clicking), then I selected one album to copy. It copied and my sync problems went away! Yea!!! I also now have automatically sync when this phone is connected and sync this iPhone over wifi unchecked.

I've tried the re-install and also setting up as a new phone without a permanent fix. Also tried the close-all-apps fix, no joy. Gave up on wifi sync years ago. I get stuck on Step 7 of 7 "waiting for changes to apply". I have a recent Mac and a recent iPad, both with upto date OS.

1 very minor distraction, I'm watching the sync over ScreenSharing and noticed the rotating-arrows does speed up and slow down. Does it actually reflect underlying progress or is it a placeholder? Could be just an artefact of the ScreenSharing process.

There are 2 classes of Mac problem, those that do get fixed, and a number that drag on for years. This and ejects-external-drive-on-sleep (and then the drive needs to be physically removed and re-connected) seem to be draggers. Managing multiple Apple TVs was another heartbreaker, did that get fixed?

Agreed. There are few iTunes features more important than this. It should ship with zero defects; failing that, Apple ought to be hopping to address the issue. Suggesting that you follow a link that explain how to recreate your library and playlists is not acceptable.

I am just flat out amazed that this is still a problem after a whole year of discussion on this thread.

I just spent two hours working on this, and it's still not fixed. I rebooted my iPhone 6 Plus at least 20 times. I have the latest iOS installed.

Also: I'm on my 2nd iPhone 6 Plus! So it has nothing to do with my particular iPhone. You might then think it's part of my music collection? Well, same problem when I'm not even syncing my music.

Apparently I have to delete all my music from my iPhone and then re-transfer it all back every time I have this problem? That is flat out insane.

Doesn't matter whether I'm using a cable or wi-fi, btw…I still have the same problem every other sync.