iTunes 11.1 does not sync successfully with iPhone 4S running iOS7

I'm seeing this also with an iPhone 4 (32G) and my iMac.

One discovery that may help if you have a LOT of music - more than can fit on your phone.

On your phone, go to Settings -> Music and turn off "Show All Music". Do the same for videos.

What I found was that in addition to downloading all of my selected songs to the phone that it was also trying to download EVERYTHING that I bought from iTunes - the sum total of which would exceed my phone's memory! Honestly, the "Show All" buttons should default to OFF.

I only discovered this because I saw a suggestion elsewhere to unselect all songs when you sync, and I still had songs left on my phone afterward. Turning "Show All Songs" off fixed that.

All that said - I seem to still have to do a Home-Power restart of the phone before every sync. The sad thing is that I've seen forums where beta users were complaining about this. How could they ship this OS with such a known problem?? Steve would not be happy.

Well, after restoring a couple of playlists to my phone, I am once again stuck in "Waiting for items to copy" 😟

I am also having the same issue. I've tried the steps above, still hung up on last step. SO frustrating. And of course I can't even dare go into the Genius Bar for help over the next week or so.

😟

i had the same problem with my iphone 4s and itunes when i updated to itunes 11.1, after a week of frustration i soon figured it out, go into all your albums in itunes, remove them one by one, shut down i tunes, reopen then add new albums back on then it will sync, mine initially keep saying ...."waiting to finishing sync" then would freeze or just stop at step 4, after i deleted all the albums then readded them everything has been fine

I'm having the same problem with an iPhone 5s. Still haven't succesfully completed the migration because it gets stuck during sync. In iTunes it says, "Waiting for Items to Copy". On the iPhone, if you go into the iTunes Wi-Fi Sync settings under General, it will show sync progress and shows that's stuck on a particular app (a different one each attempt). Cancelling sync removes all the apps it did succesfully copy and you're back at square one. It worked to install one of the apps directly from the app store, but I really don't want to do that one by one, and who knows if that would fix the syncing issue.

The only thought I have is that my cheap-skate 16GB can't hold my apps, but there are fewer than 70 and I've already removed all photos and music.

I've tried so many things in order to sync my music within iTunes 11.1 and now iOS 7.0.2 (which came available today) and I still cannot get my library to sync. All the songs show up in my library and are playable, however when they are on my phone (viewing in iTunes) they are all greyed out with the dotted circle to the left of the song titles. Also, when I attempt to play them on my phone because they are viewable it just shuffles through them and puts me back to the artist/album list within my Music. Extremely frustrating. I was hoping this new update (iOS 7.0.2) would address the issue, but it that wasn't the case.

Syncing continues to hang on "Waiting for changes to be applied" which is the 4th step and never goes away until I "x" out of it. It's so weird that when I look into Usage, my music is 0 MB, but the songs are still being listed in my music on my phone.

Apple needs to address this immediately!

@jjkraw is definitely on to something -- I discovered that ALL the music and video I've ever purchased from iTunes were being synced to the iphone. This happens because Apple stupidly put the default to ON for "Show All Music" and "Show All Video". For anyone who buys anything from iTunes, even sparingly, how in the world could anyone expect to fit that all on their mobile? I had one movie and one full season of a TV show.

So I thought it was a space issue, and that iTunes was just hanging instead of maybe, you know, warning that the device was full. Alas, I still acnnot get through a complete sync even after changing the settings and removing the music and video from the iphone.

I had this same problem, turned off wifi sync and synced with USB and it solved my problem!

I've got the same problems since September. After upgrading to 11.1.1 and 7.0.2 still it is broken.

Applications are not synced via USB, everything to be updated is in a waiting mode. It's not possible to delete these applciations in winkled mode from device. The only resolution is to update them at app store on device. No other excercise helps. 😟

Moreover, now all new applications appear on device and they are in Waiting mode too.

This is a disaster! More than one month and it is not resolved in the recent release. After 5 years of using apple products I've never been so disappointed as now.

giamo wrote:

Applications are not synced via USB, everything to be updated is in a waiting mode. It's not possible to delete these applciations in winkled mode from device. The only resolution is to update them at app store on device. No other excercise helps. 😟

You're having the exact problem I was having, and I was finally able to get past it by giving up and starting over from scratch. I spent hours and hours fruitlessly with Apple tech support (who were collectively the best customer support experience I've ever had, even though they could not solve the problem). It may or may not have had to do with sync not recognizing when the phone was out of memory, but it definitely seemed as though the initial sync during Restore From Backup never completed correctly, and sync was broken thereafter. IIRC, here's what I did to fix it. It might not all have been necessary, but here it is:

1. On the iPhone, go to Settings > Music and Settings > Videos and turn off Show All Music and Show All Videos
2. On the Mac, go to iTunes > iPhone > Summary, uncheck Automatically Sync and uncheck Sync over WiFi
3. From iTunes on the Mac, try to remove all music and video from the phone (you may or may not be able to do this from iTunes > iPhone > On This iPhone or by first checking Manually Manage Music and Videos in iTunes > iPhone > Summary) and turn off sync for all media (music, movies, etc). These items are not part of the iOS backup/restore data, but hopefully you have copies of the media backed up elsewhere.
4. Now is a good time for spring cleaning, so if there are any apps you don't want delete them from iTunes completely. Update all the remaining apps within iTunes.
5. On the Mac, go to iTunes > iPhone > Apps, click the Remove button on every app so they all say Will Remove (they'll be set to be removed from the phone, not iTunes, so you can toggle these back to Will Install later after you get sync working)
6. It's worth trying to Sync again at this point, before you go nuclear, but if it still won't complete the sync...

⚠Disclaimer: To start from scratch you need to have an existing backup to restore from that dates back to pre-iOS7-upgrade. I did this all within two days of getting the new phone and the original backup was still listed, but you're doing this a month later and I don't know how Apple handles the backup archives. I took this risk because I still had the old iPhone 4 with iOS 6 sitting there in case I needed to make a new backup. In my case Restore From Backup offered two or three backups, 1-2 dated prior to the attempted migration the new phone, and one dated after.

1. On the iPhone, go to Settings > General > Reset and tap Erase All Content and Settings ...
2. On the iPhone, go through the startup procedure, selecting to restore from the last backup you trust (before the problem with iOS7).
3. As soon as you get into iOS7, go to Settings > Music and Settings > Videos and turn off Show All Music and Show All Videos. This is just a preventative measure. In retrospect I don't think these settings actually try to download all your purchases and fill up the memory, it's just supposed to list them and then downloads them on request. At least that seems to be what they intended, but it still could be the source of the problem. It was certainly a suspicious change from iOS6 and an ill-conceived feature IMO since iTunes libraries tend to dwarf iPhone memory capacities.
4. Whatever you do, don't mess with it while it's trying to restore, and that includes the full sync that goes on in the background as content is added. So don't unplug the phone or turn of the Mac. Unplug yourself instead -- walk away from the computer and go outside for an hour or three. Don't mess with it until the both iTunes and the iPhone say the sync is complete (you can see this on the iPhone in Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync).

All right, that's all I can remember at the moment. I haven't had a syncing problem since.

I am having this exact problem on a 32 GB iPhone 4S with iOS7.0.3 (just updated 10/25/2013) and iTunes 11.1.2 (I think - just updated 10/24/2013) on a Windows PC. I sync thru a USB cable by the way. Everythin was OK before the updates.

For me, removing or adding an app to the device seems to unstick it when this happens. Your mileage may vary.

The reason is that the iTunes library of your device is ruined.

Here comes another way to solve such kind of problem:

Use a 3rd-party tool called "iTools" and delete all of the iTunes library files of your iOS Device (not your computer) via the file system of your device, then quit iTools and open iTunes.

Your device could be recognized as a "new device" and you could recover your backups to your device.

Deleting your library and recreating it worked for me!