Why does my iphone sync all 5000 songs on my phone every time I connect it?

Hi louiepatterson,

Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities.

If your entire iTunes library is syncing every time you connect your iPhone, you may want to try setting up syncing in iTunes again by following the steps in the appropriate article below. If you're syncing music, try un-checking and then re-checking the "Sync music" checkbox in iTunes.

iTunes 11 for Mac: Set up syncing for iPod, iPhone, or iPad

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12113

iTunes 11 for Windows: Set up syncing for iPod, iPhone, or iPad

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12313

Your entire library will sync again once more after this, but then only new songs should sync thereafter. If the issue persists, I'd try the troubleshooting steps in our iPhone assistant next:

Frozen or unresponsive iPhone

http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/assistant/phone/

Best,

Jeremy

Hello!

If you use auto sync it is iTunes' normal behaviour to resync all the audio which is already stored in your iPhone.

You should sync manually and drag and drop what you would like to add to your iPhone or any other iOS devices. This will prevent the music to be resynced.

Please follow the link below to learn more about how to manage your content manually:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1535

I hope this helps!

All the best!

Burcu

Hello Atlantarama!

Take a look at these articles. One is for MAC the other is for Windows.

You need to check the box next to "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPAds from syncing automatically."

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH1764?viewlocale=en_US

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH1677

I hope this helps!

Best.

B.

i am also having this same problem with my iPad mini, running iOS 7.0.3 and the most current version of iTunes / OSX Mavericks. I am syncing around 600 songs manually to my iPad, and every time I plug it in and try to add a couple of new songs, it resyncs about 500 of the current songs to my iPad. I tried everything suggested and it is still not working, any other suggestions?

thanks Burcu,,,,,,, but I think you will find we are all manually syncing at the moment. When I drag and drop even just one new track it syncs the whole 13,000. I have been to the Apple Store and they could not resolve my issue in the 30 minutes they spent. They want me to book an appointment and are talking about rebuilding libraries etc.

It worked fine on IOS 6 but IOS has been a disaster (not just for me)!

Same issue, it's definitely an ios 7 issue that apple is unaware of and unwilling to accept responsibility for. I have spent countless hours on the phone with support, and finally spoke with a supervisor who eventually leveled with me and told me i was gonna have to just factory restore. I spent forever backing everything up and finally restored to factory settings and started over from scratch. Now a few weeks in ive finally started to sync some new music and it just happened again! All of my music erased and re-synced by itunes. 600 dollars for a phone, the least they could do is make sure the thing WORKS. Apple is the glitchiest company on the market.

I have the same problem with my iPod Touch. It's set to manually manage music, and "Sync Music" is unchecked, but it started syncing all 2500 songs when I just wanted to update my mail and calendar info.

Thanks for the suggestion, but all my settings match the setup in the article. For some reason, iTunes is syncing music even though “Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically” is checked under Preferences.

Was this issue ever resolved? I have the same problem everytime I connect my phone to add a new album it has to resync all 8000 songs. The apple store's solution is to just reset or restore like that hasn't been done a million times already. Help please!

Try putting a check mark next to " Sync only checkmarked Music and Videos" in options under the Summary tab.

If all else fails, I have found that uninstalling iTunes, and then reinstalingl it again fixes alot off issues with syncing.

Thanks for the reply. Any other suggestions though?

I've always had that checked on my iTunes.

I've never uninstalled only downloaded itunes and reinstalled or maybe installed over the previous. From what I understand iTunes is pretty hard to uninstall. Dragging it to trash says it is required for Mac OS X so I've not tried to do so. I do think its an iTunes problem though and not a phone problem since it does this to all my devices. Most of the time it just says waiting for items to copy and usually never does or deletes everything.

About once a year, I run into an issue like this one with an Apple product, I go to this discussion forum, and find a thread like this one. "I'm having this issue as well!" "So am I" "Has anyone figure it out?" And I get to the end of the thread, and there's no fix. And no reply from Apple. This one is a huge pain in the ***. I've tried all the suggestions, as I always do, and they don't help, as they usually don't.

The fact that Apple is not reading/answering/learning from the issues their customers have, is not making it any better, especially as this page is called "Apple Support Communities".

Needless to say, that I have the same issue (it syncs every time my 4000+ songs, even though I only want to add the six new ones I have downloaded. It s*cks.

The only thing that keeps me dealing with the terrible software is the fact that the iPod very well integrates into my BMW car.

I have had exactly the same problem as all you guys. I think I might have just worked out what the issue is. Since the last itunes update, I'm on 11.2.2, I notice that under playlists, 'Genius Mixes' was checked (and I don't remember checking this myself). It looks like itunes is creating new genius playlists and copying many more songs than I had previously selected for syncing. After syncing 1000s of tracks it then syncs 1000s of what it calls 'genius data'. Since deselecting 'Genius Mixes' my syncing seems to be back to normal.

In my case, I believe I understand the issue and it is entirely up to Apple to resolve it. Because most households now contain more than one computer running iTunes and because it is now relatively common to use network shared drives like Airport Extreme 3TB, it's not unheard of to have multiple computers accessing the same set of library files through a network shared drive (rather than through Home Sharing).

It seems that when two (or more) computers are running iTunes against the same set of library files (music, movies, etc), each computer's iTunes software is battling over who has last updated the files. This is especially a problem if one of the computers is running Windows and one is running Mac against the same set of media files.

It doesn't make sense to have two or three copies of your music files in different folders when you can share the same set across multiple computers each running iTunes. However, it also appears that it is now no longer safe to run multiple iTunes instances on multiple computers using the same set of media files. It seems that to solve this problem it requires duplicating your library once for each installed iTunes instance so that each instance has exclusive access to the files.

Note, I found this out because my Mac had been the exclusive owner of the media files for a month or so. After I launched Windows iTunes against that same set of files, all of my files needed to be synced again to my iPod. This means that each iTunes instance is scanning and modifying each of the library files for some reason. This is at least the cause for my issue. It may be the cause for others here.

The only way to fix this problem is to make sure that the media files that are referenced in your iTunes library have exclusive access to a single instance of iTunes. No other iTunes software should access those files or you risk having the resync everything problem.