stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

Ah it's iTunes itself. Just wiped the iPhone and without restoring any backups it's still stuck sending Tones over.

Weird result again:

After the above wipe+no restore failed to sync any music (actually hung on syncing Tones), I wiped the device again and restored my previous backup.

It proceeded to sync everything back over and appeared to actually be working. I let it run for a few hours as it kept me updated of how many out of the 12,000 songs had synced (haven't seen that screen in almost a year!). I thought it had done it but then iTunes displayed the dreaded "waiting for items to copy" message. I checked how many songs I had on my phone on the Music app - 300.

Urgh.

I'd love to know what it was doing during that original sync and where those songs went.

PLEASE TRY THIS: Has worked for me twice now. Open iTunes, go to the very top left drop down menu. Select "iTunes Store", then "Authorize this computer" Put in your adobe id and password. BAM. You'll be good to go. I've had to do this twice now and it works.

PLEASE TRY THIS: Has worked for me twice now. Open iTunes, go to the very top left drop down menu. Select "iTunes Store", then "Authorize this computer" Put in your adobe id and password. BAM. You'll be good to go. I've had to do this twice now and it works.

I'm in the same boat. If I make one change to one song or playlist, my sync can take up to an hour. It's absolutely infuriating.

The iTunes programmers clearly do not care at all about the quality of their software, or they wouldn't have left this bug to fester for years and years.

One thing I do is report this bug on a daily basis here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

I'm sure it does absolutely no good, and I imagine that those contact forms don't accomplish anything, but at least I feel like I'm doing something. Maybe if enough people keep reporting this bug Apple's programmers will decide they care about the quality of their products and actually do something to address it.

I'm not holding my breath, though. This is a bad bug, and they haven't addressed it in years, so it's clear they don't give a crap. Which is sad to see; they used to write such good software.

Now it just feels like I'm using Windows.

MAY HAVE A POSSIBLE SOLUTION!

After about a year and a half of having no music on my phone I may have found a possible solution. Most of my music files are mp3's but some are m4a. I tried syncing only one album, entirely m4a's and it worked fine, the album is now on there. It seems like my problem is that I couldnt sync any mp3's. Am going to try and convert all of my mp3's tp m4a to see if it works

If you're having this problem try this theory out.

Hmm, I just tried that and its now syncing files across.

Interestingly too after I removed music from my device, it's just shifted over to the OTHER useage bar. 36gb of Other just appeared!

I'm properly confused now! So the above idea sorta worked however;

Not all music was sent over. 1100 out of 1286 tracks made it. Now my iMac iTunes is saying "Waiting for items to copy". And on my iPhone if I go to the bottom of the Song list it says "Downloading xxx of 1267". The list of songs on my phone is being updated in real time.

Once this has done I plan on synching another small playlist over too to work out if it's the file format or not.

Update: Some of the songs are getting duplicated on the device.

So, I've run into this problem, and the issue does seem to be with file format. I read this thread and saw the last three posts by Jimmirock and Rowan Clark and had a look at the file types in my library. There was a bunch of MPEG Audio files which I converted to AAC. Once I'd done that, I deleted the MPEG Audio files and then plugged the phone in. Bearing in mind that just previous to this the phone was stuck on "Waiting for changes to be applied" I would say that this looks like its the solution! The phone sync'd straight away! Great stuff, thanks guys!

Jeddemon wrote:

So, I've run into this problem, and the issue does seem to be with file format. I read this thread and saw the last three posts by Jimmirock and Rowan Clark and had a look at the file types in my library. There was a bunch of MPEG Audio files which I converted to AAC. Once I'd done that, I deleted the MPEG Audio files and then plugged the phone in. Bearing in mind that just previous to this the phone was stuck on "Waiting for changes to be applied" I would say that this looks like its the solution! The phone sync'd straight away! Great stuff, thanks guys!

I use the mp3 format of choice for my own music that I rip from CDs. Of 10,500 songs that I can manage to fit on my 64gig iphone, I have not had the stuck on "waiting for changes to be applied" (that lasted more than 10 or 15 minutes... most of the time, about 5 mins when the ios library changes due to smart playlists swapping in and out songs). Well, I did when I first upgraded from ios 6 to ios 7.1.4 and it took several wipe/restores and a bit of voodoo, but since then, it's been consistently barely tolerably slow.

With only one song I downloaded from a site from a local store "thank you for shopping here" thing (which as an mp3), the rest is either itunes bought (a few hundred), or the vast bulk what I converted directly from my CDs (about 16,000 songs), all of which is variable bitrate mp3.

If you have CDs, I would suggest reconverting them using a tool based on the 'lame' mp3 encoder with the '-V 3' setting. I find the encoding is just a touch closer to the original WAV than the itunes store version with a noticeable smaller file size. (short explanation, joint stereo -- bulk of song is in centre channel with only stereo differences on a side channel -- and variable bit rate instead of constant bit rate, so some passages can go as low as 128 or 96 kpbs with minimal loss, and other tougher passages can go as high as 320 kpbs to maintain as much detail as possible, but for most songs, the overall average is at about 175 kbps)

If you're an audio quality freak like me, do keep in mind, converting between compressed formats loses some of the detail that can make it sound considerably worse. You can reduce the loss by converting to a higher bitrate (for example, 128 -> 192, 192 -> 256, 256 -> 320), but the size will increase and you will still introduce some noise that tends to mute the sharp passages like cymbals even more.

I suspect your mp3s got corrupted somehow (for example a bad id3 tagger that messed things up that it shouldn't have, or a bad harddrive sector, etc), or maybe was converted by an encoder that used non standard options, which could well confuse the ios or itunes (as far as syncing is concerned). It might not be the actual mp3 itself, but the act of creating a new audio file would likely cause itunes to evaluate the new independently of the old (like gapless markers), which may well be the problem (if the end-gap of the song is a few samples beyond the last usable mp3 frame, it would be reset when converted to aac and loaded as a new song for example).

It could also have nothing to do with the media file itself, it could be the media id that is somehow the problem... by dropping the file and adding a completely new one (even if it is the same media), might cause itunes to give it a completely new media id and the ios would treat it as a completely different song, even if it happens to actually be the same one.

If you still have the original mp3s, you might try adding them back into itunes and see if the problem comes back.

Hi Pegaudet

I reckon you are right. The songs were from some bootleg CD's of some live shows and I reckon they probably were probably encoded in a way that iTune's syncing didn't like. They all played fine. The sound quality on them wasn't great to be honest so I don't think I have lost anything through converting them but thanks for the tips around the conversion of audio tracks, very useful.

The only issue I have is that I converted them and then deleted the old MP3 files. I still have them on CD's somewhere but would have to find them to try it again. The conversion definitely solved my problem though.

Thanks

Cheers for that, I'll give it a go later. I'm currently backing up (Time Machine AND duplicating my iTunes folder), first plan is to wipe all metadata in all songs using iTunes and 3rd party apps. Then I'll try converting all my music within iTunes.

(I don't know if either those will help me since my sync gets stuck on sending plain old ringtones over sometimes! (exported from Garageband and have no tags OR iTunes generated tags))

Nope, nothing. First I tried removing album art: still no sync. Then I tried removing ALL metadata tags: still no sync. I converted a lot of my music into various formats using iTunes itself: no luck on MP3 (128 or 320kbps) or AAC.

I've rebuilt playlists from scratch. It's been stuck on ringtones in the past. I've got an idea of what my next set of devices will be, and they're not Apple branded.

This may be significant.

I still buy CDs, and I rip them my own way as mp3s and import them into itunes. I got the first 3 new Led Zeppelin albums remasters, which was imported and synced to my phone fairly quickly. A couple days ago, I wanted to force itunes to order them properly (1 then 2 then 3) rather than have it randomly put them in whatever order it felt like it. Incidentally, right now, they are properly ordered in itunes, but they are still in no particularly useful order on the ios, under the artist.

This morning, after 1 1/2 hours of waiting for a sync I gave up, killed the sync and went to work (yes there are more important things to do than waiting for the sync to finish) and took my ipod touch along because I didn't have the playlist I wanted on the phone (ipod touch took about 3 mins to sync with ios 6... ah the fond memories...).

Tonight it took almost another 2 hours beyond the 1 1/2 this morning to finish the sync.

It might be that something either on the phone or in itunes triggers the phone to do a serious re-examination of what it has (maybe it actually opens each file, one by one and compares the tags? If you have a lot like 10,000 it can be painfully tedious to wait for it finish).. At any rate, there was nothing different this time than what I had before and all playlists I sync to the phone are smart playlists that change on their own.

There should be absolutely NO reason why it went through this dog and pony show today, given my media has not changed (I suppose with the exception that now my first 3 zepp albums have a "sort album" field with a value), and now that it has gone through this long sync, it appears for the moment to be back to its usual 15 minute sync time self.

I wonder if some people have what appears to be this type of issue where whatever they do seems to cause the phone to decide it needs to rebuild the database, based on the media there, when you did something nearly trivial like move the mouse.

It also seems the only time it will take a long time is when I need to sync it before I go to work... as if it know I can't afford to wait around so it chooses that time to screw up.

😁

I can relate to that. What I thought was a solution appears not to be, its now gone back to taking until the end of time to sync.

What is frustrating is that you would think syncing items between a device and a pc would be fairly bread and butter stuff given the other technologies that have been introduced. I'm not going to rant at apple though as I have had this issue with other music services / devices / manufacturers. Just annoying when the iMac the iPhone the iPad etc are such good pieces of kit, that a physically connected sync screws up the enjoyment!

I guess in the case of iTunes Syncing, "It Doesn't Just Work"! I'll keep having a go with different things around the tags etc I reckon.