stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

The latest updates seem to be getting to fancy for Apple. Adding fancy crap and yet stability is going to pot on all my Apple devices. I'm about to go back to a Franklin Planner and a flip phone because I can't stand MS and Apple is becoming a pain in the butt.

Well I wish I hadn't read this TBH. Should have realised that all my playlists based on date added would get messed up. Didn't realise all my ripped DVDs would get classified as Home Movies and lose the TV series information I put in. And does my iPod want to sync properly? nope.

What an irritation. I have had the same problem with movies getting reclassified as Home Movies since Mavericks. Apple used to be the better, more user-friendly alternative to the Microsoft PC. Not anymore. The advantage is now just reduced to security - which is still a good one. But when that goes, what will we be left with?

For now it would be super awesome if I could just get my iPhone to sync with my iMac iTunes library.

(Mac user since 1984)

What I have been doing which has been working, but is still unacceptable, is deleting the music on my iPhone before I sync. The funny thing is I can NOT do it via settings/general/usage/manage storage/music because settings shuts down on me.

So what I do is open music and delete the music one GENRE at a time. That takes the music off my iphone. (Don't make the mistake of deleting it via "Playlist" because that will delete your playlists from iTunes). Then I sync.

This is unacceptable, but it is a workaround until Apple gets its act together.

Thanks for sharing that. I have been dealing with this issue for months now. Sometimes my phone will sync, sometimes it won't. I just wish I would have known about not deleting the playlists from my phone yesterday, because that's exactly what I did. And then I had to spend several hours recreating my playlists.

You're right -- this is unacceptable of Apple not to fix this issue. Apple's products are supposed to help us save time, not waste time.

robertcoogan wrote:

For now it would be super awesome if I could just get my iPhone to sync with my iMac iTunes library.

LOL 😁 Sad but true. It's like having a blender which has blades that turn just fine; you just can't put any food or liquid in the machine. That would likewise be a serious design flaw.

What ended up working for you? Rebuilding the library? That's what I did and I think I forgot to mention, that I did have to get rid of all the music on my phone once but after doing that and rebuilding the library it's not been an issue at all again.

It's kind of hit and miss. Sometimes the sync actually works and other times it doesn't. I have never needed to rebuild my library. In the past, I have deleted all the music from my iPhone 4S to get it to work. Other times I've simply turned it off and back on before syncing, and this seemed to do the trick. This last time, though, I deleted the music, I turned it off and on, I banged it on the table 😠, but I couldn't get it to sync no matter what I tried.

I'm using my iPhone 4S basically like an iPod for the time being, because I finally went ahead and got a 5S a while back to replace it. We also have an iPod 4th Gen, an iPad 3, and my wife has an iPhone 4S. I have not run into any problems syncing any of the other devices - just my 4S. So it doesn't seem to be an issue with the library on my PC itself - otherwise I think I would see the problem across all of the devices.

I have an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.1 and had the same problem. Sync stuck on waiting for changes and I noticed that 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 successfully synced my phone. I added the music mack on after. No problem since then.

Amazing that after a year this is still happening an Appled o not have clear instructiions on what to do to fix this. The whole Itunes software is just a pain. You have to go through this whole cycle, just to add a couple of songs, books or apps.

Like many of you, I was having a nightmare with syncing music to my 128g iPhone 6. I finally solved it, so far. I've synced back all the music I wanted to with zero issues. For me, it seemed the issues were with files that were getting conversion errors in iTunes. Not converting bitrate, but file types. What I did was, in the Browser, I added the field "type". I went through and converted anything that wasn't already AAC to that file type. Once I did that, I had no more issues. There were some ghost files I had to delete but they didn't hang the sync up. It seems that whereas in the past if there were files that it couldn't convert it would just give you a warning dialogue, that now if there are more than a few it hangs the sync up.

I guess the bottom line is a little housekeeping goes a long way, once I did all that (and yes, it was a a pain), everything works as it should.

I finally got my sync to work!!!!!! I did not want to blow away my playlist or any configuration, so I tried a ton of things to get around this. I'm only including what I think fixed it, but would want others to try this and see if it was this step that fixed it. I opened the properties of iTunes, went to "Sharing" and selected "Share my music on my network" and "Share entire library" and "Home Sharing computers and devices update play counts". <- I know this does not make sense because I'm not syncing via the network, I'm using a cable, but it worked.

As soon as I did this, it started to sync. Other things I did that I don't think helped, but want to include in case someone else is looking into this, I went to the settings on my device, General-iTunes Wi-Fi Sync and cancelled from there, and then restarted. Hope this works for you too!!!

Yes, it is amazing they have not fixed this.

I have restored my phone and re-created my library. Sync is fine for a week or two, then right back to the hours-long 'Waiting for changes to be applied" ...and with no changes to my library! Sometimes it never stops and I have to kill it.

This has been going on for over a year and affects everyone I know to some degree. Enough to ask me, "Why does it take so long to sync my phone?"

It's very obvious the people currently working on iTunes are either incompetent at fixing bugs or they just don't care.

My iPhone had a minor wobble last week, I copied over a new album onto a phone that was getting full. There was enough room but for some reason it had removed all my album art, and most of my songs were no longer playing (they were in my phone's library but couldn't be played back). Worried, I just left it syncing over night. It worked the next day - everything was back on it just right.

New idea: could this be (in part) caused by running out of space on your device? (I know it can't be THE cause, because it used to stumble when I was syncing few songs onto a freshly formatted phone)

I'm following another big discussion thread where iTunes seems to be just losing songs over time. It's like you know you sucked in a CD of songs, but at some point later you discover that 3 or 4 of the tracks have gone missing. I wonder if this is what is upsetting the sync? iTunes trying to sync songs that the xml list on the phone/pad/pod says should be there, but that it has accidentally deleted? When the sync fails to finish it always seems to be related to songs for me.