IOS 8 won't sync music with itunes

I'll try this - thanks.

I just went through the whole thing manually, folder by folder, and removed a few things:

• 2 epub files added in 2010
• 2 empty folders: “Automatically Add to iTunes” and “Downloads”
• 1 folder of an album which the song files were duplicates, but which only appeared one in the library
• An album of songs I created in Garageband which were in AIFF format. These should be supported but I took them out just to be safe.

I'm re-syncing now.

EDIT: I restarted my phone and iTunes, reconnected, and did a sync - it immediately started transferring over 8,000 songs - about half my library. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I agree completely! I am online with Apple now (after my third restore) and am being told "this is a new issue to us". SERIOUSLY??? They are having me restore phone to factory settings and then manually adding things back. Lets see how this goes. I am NOT a happy camper right now.

After transferring the 8,000 songs I tried to sync again immediately, and it got stuck on the first step - "waiting to start sync" I believe it's called. After almost an hour it didn't go anywhere so I quit and restarted my phone and iTunes. I connected and started a new sync and it started transferring over 4,000 songs - seems to be the difference between my iTunes library and the number of songs on my iPhone.

This is terrible and I'm getting real sick of it. I got rid of all non-music files in my iTunes library folder but that didn't seem to fix anything.

I have 80% of my library synced, so I'm just gonna leave it that way until the inevitable iTunes update arrives, without changing any of my original settings.

I shouldn't have to jump through any hoops just to get everything to sync, so I'm not going to try anymore.

THANK YOU! THIS IS THE ONLY RESPONSE THAT MADE SENSE TO ME AND IT DEFINITELY WORKED!

Anyone still waiting for Apple to adress this? Forget it, they won't. The same problem occured with the introduction of iOS6 and iOS7. I found the discussion on this same forum about iOS7 and stopped reading it on page 40, with postst from may 2013, 8 months after the introduction! See the discussion: Music not syncing after iOS 7 update (the first 22 pages you can skip, only people whining). Apple never reacted. For me confirmation it's not a bug. Apple can react a little weird when it's about hardware, but it fixes bugs, and fixes them fast. It couldn't afford not to, specially after the iCloud hack, Bendgate and 8.01.

My advice: it could be wise to not only clean up your iTunes library(s), but also to repair your disk permissions with Disk Utility or to run OnyX (you can check the log afterwards to see if there were a lot of iTunes problems). With me, OnyX took minutes 'Verrifying disk structure' and needed a lot of time 'Deleting kernel cache'. If that still doesn't help a clean install of iTunes maybe will. And it could be even wise to reinstall the OS. If that doens't help maybe a clean install of the OS will. With me everything is back to normal after cleaning up the library and running OnyX. I wish you luck.

After a long back and forth with Apple about my issue- 4s won't sync after iOS8 update, I think I found a solution.

I am running OSX 6.8, iTunes 11.4, iPhone 4s with iOS 8.0.2

First: Do a hard restore on your phone and set it up as a new phone.

Uninstall/delete iTunes from your computer- all related files and folders. You don't have to delete your actual mp3 files or movies etc.

Re install iTunes 11.4. Let it run its setup routine, then plug your phone in.

Itunes will recognize your phone and the "sync" button should be available.

Note: your music will not be present in iTunes. You will have to MANUALLY double click on EVERY song/video/podcast etc to get them to appear in iTunes.

Kind of a PITA but not the end of the world. I have a bit over 2 TB of media. Gonna be a long day.

This is by no means a guarantee that this will work for you, but it's much easier than downgrading to 11.3

Good Luck!

iPhone 6, 128GB, 8.0.2. here, "upgrade" from a 4S 64GB. Careful what I wished for all these months 😁 Between iOS8, iTunes, and a stall on delivery of the Otterbox case, it's been a nightmare for weeks. Phone is great when it works, but I'm getting the same disappearing/skipped over songs, 6000 worth, nothing consistently stays on the phone except whatever I bought through iTunes (minimal). This is an absolute nightmare, I'm sure Apple will figure it out eventually and without admitting to anything they'll send out a fix to iOS8, iTunes, whatever the deal is. It's just dealing with it until then, I'm tempted to just NOT sync the phone, that seems to be the only real solution right now, scary.

I have to say that I have found the review of these threads to be exhausting but extremely helpful. As best as I can tell, I am not alone, but no one has come up with a solution that lasts. Personally, I have restored, deleted, backed up and restored again, along the lines of several good suggestions, and I've gotten it to work for a while, but then all of a sudden all of my music disappears again and I'm starting from scratch. And every time I do a full reset/restore, I wind up having to set everything else up again - preferences, connections, etc. This is a real PITA, I was SO looking forward to my iPhone 6 until all of this. So I'm basically saying "thank you" to everyone who has tried to resolve this, I continue reviewing the many posts and trying various things and I really appreciate the efforts. Tonight I have a call scheduled with Apple support, I am putting NO confidence in their ability to resolve the issue on anything more than a temporary basis.

Bottom line -- thank you to everyone who has posted at least an attempt or two to resolve this issue, that's more than I can say for Apple.

I can say that scouring the music source folder and removing non-music files, and working with a restored as new iPhone has, for at least 24 hours and about 50 syncs, worked for me.

So try -

1. removing all non-music files from your iTunes Music folder and any other folder that may contain music. (see the boolean search method posted earlier to isolate non-music files).
2. select and delete all your songs from iTunes (do NOT delete the files from the computer when prompted)
3. in iTunes, Add to Library and pick your (now cleansed) ITMF, and any others to add your music back
4. restore your iPhone (I suggest as new)
5. sync, setting your Music sync settings to how you prefer
6. try several syncs, quite iTunes, restart the computer/iPhone, to test continued good function.
7. if it continued to work, resync your apps and hopefully you are good

You might also alternatively try changing steps 2 & 3 to creating a new Library (option-start iTunes) and Adding your now-cleansed music folder(s) (you may want to first disable the Copy Music option before adding the music back, otherwise iTunes will duplicate the music files to the new ITL location)

Finally, I do remember many years ago, in the days of Limewire and other sharing sites, more than a few corrupt files could be downloaded that would foul up libraries. I'm sure there's a wide range of people here, and they may have more layers of issues than I had. But if you have lots of downloads from non-commercial sites, they may be compounding the issue.

It's quite possible iTunes has become more strict on file format structure; if so, they are not capturing those errors and informing the user correctly - rather, it is just corrupting the sync. Clearly, the few non-music files that were in my folder weren't an issue before, but it seems they were now.

Apple needs to address this - all syncs should be verified as matching the iTunes sync selection, or, warn the user there were errors and why (and how to fix)

Are you syncing with a charger or just through the wifi?

Me? USB cable direct to my iMac...

I can almost understand this all on a first read, and I'm not all that smart 🙂 It's a solid game plan. I am going to try to follow it step by step, later tonight. Probably right after my call of futility with Apple this evening. I have to at least TRY and let them fix it first. I will repost any results good bad or indifferent. Again, thank you Greg, you seem to have a good game plan here, thank you for sharing.

The boolean search should look something like this (started by selecting the main iTunes music folder:

as you minus out file types, the list reduces to just folders, which you can ignore, or file types outside what you've excluded in the search - in this example, a .cal file. Note this file was buried inside another folder, but the search results are flat, so you don't need to look inside any folder - just scroll the results list.

Also note the boolean search does not seem to be working in Yosemite beta DP 4, only in Mavericks, and I presume, earlier...

Hope this helps some...

My first challenge this evening -- Windows vs. Mac 🙂 Hopefully I can still follow the logic of the early steps in the process (i.e. Boolean search of the appropriate folders/files etc.). Thanks!

Greg - in the subsequent syncs that you've done after this fix, have you made changes to the library such as adding or deleting songs, or modifying album art, lyrics, etc.?