stuck on waiting for changes to be applied

I have a iphone 4s (7.0.3) and macbook air (OS X 10.9), never had any issues with doing sync between macbook air and iphone. About a week ago I noticed that some photos were not syncing. Since then I've restored my phone 4 times, but can't even get one song or video to sync. Voice memos sync without issue but if I add a playlist or single song (or single song in a new playlist) I get the dreaded "waiting for changes to be applied". I've tried all the tricks turning off wifi, bluetooth, find my phone, deleting icloud account, reinstalling iTunes and even rebuilding my itunes library from scratch (twice). Spinning arrows stop on the phone but itunes (11.1.3) never completes. On accaision it will sync some songs but they are empty. I have no idea what to do next... this bites!!!

This is idiotic.

Fix the bug. I should not have to spend hours researching an issue, then re-build my library because of programming incompetence.

I hate to say it but Apple is becoming more like MS every day.

What a disgrace.

I am experiencing this problem too i could swear so much right now but i am controlling myself, i really need help with this because i cant put anything on to my iphone and i want to know how to fix it with out deleting everything please help me

I'm having a similar issue. After clicking the cancel sync button and waiting for iTunes to cancel sync (which iTunes doesn't do,) I see the following error message in the Console log:

11/13/13 6:30:58.540 PM iTunes[47952]: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_WRITE] delete: "No such file or directory" - 0x2

Not sure if that is related to the cause...

You'll all be glad to know that a Senior Support Advisor at Apple is currently helping me and has acknowledged that this issue a serious problem and is communicating the issue to the Apple engineering team.

In the meantime, the Advisor is continuing to troubleshoot the issue with me. He is having me send him screenshots and diagnostic information for the engineering team to use.

According to the Advisor, this issue (or a similar one) was spotted by Apple at some point and the engineering team thought they fixed it with the released of iTunes 11.1.2. That is obviously not the case. I informed the Advisor of this ongoing support thread and the many others that have popped up, showing that this is a widespread problem. I'll continue to update this thread with any new info I learn. Fingers crossed.

My story is similar to others here. I have been experiencing the issue since the upgrade to iOS7 and iTunes 11.1 (and carrying through all updates since). I've experienced the issue across multiple devices - an iPhone 4 and a brand new iPhone 5S - always running the latest versions of the software. iTunes to iPhone syncing gets stuck indefinitely on "Waiting for changes to be applied," erasing audio content, creating large blocks of "Other" data, and generally behaving erratically. The best workaround I've found is erasing all audio content and then re-syncing it all back onto the phone, but that fix is only temporary and obviously time-consuming. Other unsuccessful troubleshooting: restore iPhone from backup, restore from factory settings, rebuild iTunes library .itl file, reinstall iTunes, reinstall OS X, weed through iTunes library for possible corrupt audio files, etc etc. Some of these methods cause the sync to work temporarily, only for the problem to return.

Last week I took my Phone 4S-32GB into the local Apple store Genius bar and explained the situation. They had never heard of this problem and thought it might be a WinXP issue since XP is "on the way out". I explained it happened after the latest IOS & Itunes upgrades. They offered to debug my problem if I brought in my CPU; I sync to and keep my music on my home desktop.

Took the box in last night. They provided a screen, ethernet cable & keyboard; I took a mouse. Sure enough it did the same old waiting for changes... and the nice Genius lady set out to find the problem. First she checked and found that I had not upgraded to IOS 7.0.4 which just came out. Apparently they also released another ITunes upgrade this week as well, and we upgraded to ?11.2.3? We also did the IOS uppgrade through the Cloud and she did a little digging and surmised that in fact Itunes was NOT backing up my Iphone to the HD even though it claimed it was!! Then she insisted I back up the Iphone to Icloud which worked well (took about 2.5 GB-I have the free 5GB account). However, the music transfer still garnered the same error using the USB wire after both IOS & ITunes upgrades. More checking on their in-house tech line: she said I had a corrupt "permissions file" in my Itunes subdirectory in the Applications folder. SO we uninstalled Itunes and I completely deleted that subdirectory to erase any trace of the previous installation. (She also cautioned me that Voice memos might be screwing this up so we unchecked this in ITunes and later I deleted these from my HD-not sure it's necessary, though). Then I RE-installed Itunes. Guess What....we did a limited music install of a few playlists and they transferred fine. When I got home I installed my entire music library successfully, so it has worked at least twice with 0 errors. BTW if your sync gets to "waiting for changes" and the little circular icon at the top of the phone screen stops spinning-you're dead in the water!

I suspect the "waiting for changes" hangup is a symptom of several different but possibly related problems and I'm not optimistic that there will be a universal "fix" until Apple has a better grasp on all the different underlying causes. BUT I would be cautious if you think your Iphone is Really getting backed up to your HD as long as this issue exists. Maybe try the Cloud as some insurance..... It's pretty easy and free if you have <5GB of essential "stuff" on the Phone and it completely circumvents this problem-at least it did for me.

Not sure if this will fix everyone's issues, but I have not seen this posted. Good luck!

LeoGecko wrote:

I disabled the auto sync in iTunes like in step 5 of cpaulPHL post. After that I connected my iPhone to iTunes and selected the Devices> Transfer Purchases from "my iPhone".

This took a long time and seemed to transfer everything. This completed and then after that I was able to sync with no problem even after turning find my iphone on again.

This worked for me.

iPhone 5

IOS7

Snow Leopard

Glad to know that I am not the only person observing this. I thought it had to do with the choice of USB port or the cable, but the problem happens from time to time for no reason and goes away for no reason. It is particularly irksome when it occurs during a RESTORE process which seems to happen a lot for me. After waiting what seemed 15 minutes it finally started syncing the music (everything else had already synced). I'm guessing it got hung up with the 2500 songs in the libarary and something in there caused it to take a lot longer than expected.

Usually for me once it has synced music the problem goes away.

My big issue has been that every update to my iPhone 4S since 7.0.2 has crashed the iphone midprocess requiring a total RESTORE before doing the update. Usually I only have about 1GB of my 32GB of space left when all this is going on.

I have an iPod 5th gen running the latest software 7.0.4 with iTunes also running the latest software 11.1.3 (8) on a MacBook Pro mid 2012. I cannot get any of my ripped music to install on the iPod. However, all the app store purchased songs can be synced. ITunes can play all of my songs. I've performed a factory reset on the iPod, recreated all music on iTunes and tried syncing with no success. I only have 700 songs with barely any device space used. Coming from windows, I had the impression that with Apple's "closed ecosystem" issues such as this were non-existent. I've tried alot of things and so far, I seem to be dead in the water. I'm always stuck on step 5 of 5...Waiting for changes to be applied. I hope they send a patch soon.

Okay, let me see if can help you. Can you answer the following questions for me?

1. What type of computer is iTunes Loaded on (include Operating System version)?

2. What type of device (include Gen., etc.)?

3. How much space is left on the device?

4. What is your version of iTunes and Device?

5. Are there any songs that can sync? i.e. store bought songs?

1- Windows 8.1

2-iPhone 5 iOS 7.0.4

3-24 gigs

4-itunes 11.1.3.8

5- all songs sync after about 30 minutes stuck on waiting for changes to be applied. At times itunes wants to resync the entire library too.

yes. It syncs my songs, but it take a minumum of 30 mimnutes as it gets stuck on waiting for changes to be applied. Oncei n a while it will delete some songs or want to actually resync the entire music library. It never takes less than 30 minutes, and sometimes doesn;t even recognize that there is new music to sync to the phone.

Oh good. I thought you weren't able to listen to your songs. You'll have to wait for the patch to come out (assuming that one is going to be issued) as there is nothing I can do to fix the underlying issue. I was happy that I was able to get my songs back on the device!

Oh, I would turn off all automatic syncing until apple gets this under control .

I'm not sure how this issue can be considered "fixed" if there are people that are still having problems. My setup is as straightforward (all apple, no funky stuff) as you can get and it is up to date (as is my iPod) so if this issue is considered "fixed", I'm a little bit concerned.

I seem to have gotten the problem resolved for me. I called Apple and was told that they are aware that there is an issue, particularly with earlier iPhones (ie 4, 4s) and the new operating system. There seems to be something in the sync process of the newer IOS that has a lower tolerance and stops the sync from completing, because the system is not seeing the file(s) as being acceptable and trying again and again. What he suggested for me is that most of the time this happens in the last step where music is being synced. Therefore, what he asked me to do is delete my library and sync without the library and without as many additional things as possible (ie photos, voice messages, etc etc). The idea being to eliminate all of the possible data files that might have mild corruption. Then add back some at a time and see what happens with the goal of finding the "corrupt" or offending file(s). I found that for me there were 4 messages of files in the library that could not be found. I eliminated these and the sync now works. It's a painful process if you have a very large music library, but sometimes you can guess where files might not be good, because of their source.

One solution which I DID NOT like was that you can do Music Match for awhile and this will clean your library which you can then download back with the updated and new files from iTunes.