stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

Adding one album to my iPhone 6. That's it. Zero other changes. I'm at just over an hour and a half of "waiting for changes to be applied."

I've already restored my iPhone 6 as a new device and recreated my iTunes Library.

iOS 8.1.2

iTunes 12.0.1.26

OSX 10.10.1

2011 3.4 GHz i7 iMac

Maybe 2015 will be the year Apple fixes this 2013-era bug.

Same problems still in 2015. I cannot sync. Just hangs for HOURS waiting for changes to apply.

I'm ready to try out a different brand of everything. Anyone else like Amazon products and services? Apple has become a serious joke.

I had similar problem but I noticed at the end that the problem was that I had not authorized the iphone anymore because I changed the password.

The problem is that iTunes does not says that to you...and just keep stuck on the "waiting for changes...".

Just in case is usefull for somebody someday...

Here's what finally worked for me after about 18 restores of my 6 plus in two months:

On iphone:

close all apps

hot spot on

find my phone off - delete app

facebook - delete app

dragon - delete app

google voice -delete app

On itunes

sync music checked

options

check sync only checked songs and video (all others unchecked)

check sync music - check entire music library

preferences : do not check keep files organized

do check prevent sync automatically

I used the cord that came with the phone.

So far, so good, even after ripping new CDs and syncing the phone repeatedly.

Not sure which combination of voodoo got this to work, but it's doing well now.

iTunes 12.1 was released yesterday, 1/29/2015. It's the first major update to iTunes 12.

Among the release notes is: "This update also improves performance when syncing when your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch."

Has anyone noticed a difference? So far, I have not.

This time, my problem message was, "waiting for files to copy," or something like that. After 20 minutes stuck I cancelled.

Not surprisingly, this deleted most of my music from the phone — and pretty much all album art. The "Music" app sees song titles, but can't find the files. So now I have to spend a bunch of time messing with some kind of band-aid hack — just to get my phone to play music again. Not to mention the long wait for songs to copy back to the phone (I have over 10k songs on my 128gb phone).

Apple's performance on these (multi-year) bugs is beyond pathetic. Apple is quickly becoming Microsoft. And I say that as someone who's been a Mac fan and has posted here since 2002. I guess some of it may be that Apple has taken the lead with consumers, so they don't need to be special anymore, vis-à-vis Microsoft. I used to tell my friends that they should get Apple stuff, because it "just works." I've stopped doing that now.

It puts me in mind of this article from Mac Daily News: "Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better"

"Dear Mr. Cook — “It just works.” That’s getting tougher and tougher for us OS X and iOS users to say with straight faces lately…"

http://macdailynews.com/2015/01/05/open-letter-to-tim-cook-apple-needs-to-do-bet ter/

<Edited by Host>

The question is - will this fix hold? I have been struggling with having to restore twice in my first week of use. I am really shocked that this is such a simple task - sync new songs from iPod to touch - and it doesn't work right.

The odds are extremely high that this fix won't hold. I am no longer shocked that Apple either doesn't have a fix. I expect that the replacement for iPhoto will get rid of the problem - for people with computers that can upgrade to the latest OSX. The big irritation to me is Apple's refusal to communicate with us about bugs such as this.

This is depressing. Apple was always so reliant. I have no trouble syncing my ipad. What makes this worse is that I'm a music person, so this is my first experience post Ipod Classic. I kinda hate the Touch,but I don't have much choice.

Well, I gotta say that since the last iTunes update (12.1.0.50) I haven't had any trouble syncing. There's been a couple of times when it looked like it was going to hang on "Waiting for changes...", but so far over the last month or so it's always finished. Good job, Apple.

iPad Air, iOS was 7 then 8.

I have found a solution for me (probably short term)

iPhone 6 Plus iOS 8.2

Libary 24k songs

Phone 14k songs.

Background:

My phone continually got hung up on waiting for changes.

I switched to iTunes Match. It was fine streaming, but it was not able to "download all" of the songs on the playlist, so I went back to syncing.

First I blitzed my phone. Started fresh.

Then, reading about the potential conflicts with DRM, I found 5 songs that were protected ACC.

Per the instructions on Apple.com, I deleted them and re-downloaded them via iTunes match to hopefully download ACC versions.

3 of them downloaded as ACC.

The other 2 remained protected acc.

I tried burning them to disc with the intent to reimport.

The disc would not burn.

So, i threw away $1.98 and just deleted them.

Then I synced. It went fine.

Then I synced again (I have smart playlists that change based on the songs that are played)

And those supplemental songs seemed to synced fine.

So maybe, just maybe, those two pesky protected ACC files were the source of my woes (**** you, Funkmaster Flex!)

Sync seems to be working for me lately. I'm almost afraid to report this, lest it be some kind of brief anomaly. Could it be that our long national nightmare is over?

I'm using: iTunes 12.1.2 Yosemite 10.10.3 iOS 8.3

If it keeps working like this, I might even risk the "Convert higher bit rate songs" option again.

DO not change the settings if they work!

I did and I have just had to erase the iPhone for the fifth time, everytime Apple sends out an update these syncproblems begin all over.

The solution could be blocking Apple entirely, it´s easy on the Mac but can an iPhone be made to block updates?

I had the same issue as everyone else, so I Google'd and found this thread

Not sure if it's mentioned here already, but what I did to fix it was:

- In iTunes, deselect "Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected"
- I then unplugged the iPhone, went into Settings>General>Usage>Music then deleted all the music. This didn't work the first time, so I did it about 3 times.
- Then plugged into iTunes again. Didn't sync, but under Music selected "Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres", deselected everything, started a sync, then midway into the sync I cancelled it.
- Manually selected the music I wanted in iTunes, then let it sync. Took a while (had to copy all the music across again), but now it works!

I'm not sure this method will work for everyone, but it worked for me. I'm certain there is an easier way, but this is how I got it to work without factory restoring or resetting my phone.

Good luck!!!

Well, functional iTunes sync was indeed too good to be true. As of just now, iTunes is inexplicably "Syncing Artwork" to my iPhone.

That is to say, artwork for 6,000 tracks. Artwork that was already there.

Looks like the ongoing disaster of iTunes sync is not over.