Q: Is there a fix to error -54 for Windows?
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Jul 31, 2014 1:38 PMby Rooster_Man,It may be too late for you to try what I did, but by the looks of it, it will be viewed many times going forward.
I noticed I was having the problem with songs that had been in WMA format but converted by iTunes. From what I read, this error is actually about permission issues for the files. I tried changing the permissions on the directory and cascade them to each file, but that didn't work. Reading more, one user got around the problem by zipping the problem files and use the files from the zip to sync. That worked for them. I tried that and it didn't work. Then I just figured there is some residual setting either on the iPad or in iTunes that was still hosing me.
I'd gotten pretty annoyed by this time so I figured I have to start with a clean slate. I reset the iPad to factory condition. I then went to windows restore and selected the restore point prior to installing iTunes. I then went thru the painful process of setting everything up again. Once I was installed and let the music be added to iTunes, I went thru and "unchecked" everything I didn't care if it went to the iPad. That was frustrating since I didn't actually have any check boxes showing. Since I was going to exclude whole albums, I did a right click on one in iTunes and there was an option in the context menu to uncheck the box. I did this for all the unwanted albums At this point, I connected the iPad and it was recognized. I went to the page to set up the syncing options. I tried to do it manually, but that was going to be a huge pain so I did the automatic sync and check the box to NOT sync unchecked items.
Finally, it started to work. I still got about 15 of the error -54 messages. I just clicked it away and the syncing continued.Since I had nearly 2000 songs transfer, I don't know which caused the error but I now have music on my iPad.
It's a lot of work, but I finally got the results I wanted. Hope this helps.
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Sep 27, 2014 12:12 PMby rspyke,On the Windows version of iTunes, error -54 means a general IO error occurred that can be caused by many different things: a file is corrupt, a file is locked, or an .m4a file could not be converted to a lower bit rate. My problem ended up being the last one. All of my music was ripped with another program into a .m4a format that runs well on both my iPod and iPhone, but will give me the dreaded -54 error when I have the "Convert higher bit rate songs to..." option checked. This happens at random, since after multiple tries, the music will all sync with my iPhone. If I don't have the music converted, then everything syncs normally.
You might want to use another program to re-sample the audio files at a lower bit rate like I did to keep my iPhone from being filled up (I used a free converter I found online).
