IOS 8 won't sync music with itunes

Thank you!!! Such an easy solution and it seems to have fixed my problem.

The best way I've figured out to do this is to uncheck the box that says sync music, hit apply, then sync music again. My iPhone 5 was having the same problem, not syncing music and having phantom storage, and was getting stuck in the "waiting for changes to be applied" step.

Another thing I'm hoping to use so that I don't have to do this again (syncing all my music takes forever) is to uncheck the box that says "sync every time this iPhone is connected to this computer". That way it won't try to sync every time and continue to do this. This sync will mark the third time that I have had to put all music back onto my phone. Hopefully they fix it with an update to iTunes.

My music was not removed but when I created a new play list in Itun it does not sink to the Iphone 6

I close all apps turned off the phone and it still does not sink the new playlists.

Update: I braved sync my phone again to add another movie and all went bonkers. Had to restore phone again to factory setting and start over. Now that I am back to having my library back on, certainly waiting on next iOS update before I sync again. Silly to have to restore everytime I want to sync.

....only one word: a mess.... Biggest asset for apple has always been protect clients and now.... ridiculous!

I've been having this exact same problem on an iPhone 6 since I got it on Friday. I am not having the problem with my iPad Air running iOS8.

I thought it might have been due to a corrupt backup so I installed a clean iOS 8 on the phone. It worked up until this afternoon, although there were sometimes long delays.

In fact, it seems like the more new or modified music I'm trying to add to the device, the longer it gets. A lot of times this is simply edited lyrics.

I've tried every other recommendation I've seen here and other places; kill all apps, stop and restart the sync after unchecking sync music - nothing.

I also had the issue where there was a ton of "other" occupied space on the phone. I believe this to be music that is on the device but is not recognizzed by the phon'e smusic app, because the amount of music displaying on the device does not corralate to the amount of space being used.

This is a huge mess. I've never had this problem before, but then I've never tried to sync this much music. Maybe iTunes just can't handle syncing a lot of music? I have about 16,000 songs in my library. I sync the whole library to the phone but not to the iPad.

I'm having the exact same problem. First time ever for me involving an Apple upgrade. This is a mess. I have tried everything. I want my music and playlists back on my phone and iPad!

An update: I let iTunes go and eventually, after about 30 minutes, it synced and was ok. However I synced again a few minutes later and it synced about 100 songs that it must not have gotten on the last sync. It did these fairly quickly with no real delay.

I see something strange and I don't know if it indicates where the problem lies: under General>About it says the phone has 2 videos on it. But it doesn't. The video app shows zero videos on the device and no videos are shown when the phone is connected to iTunes. So I'm wondering if there is some bass information somewhere that is causing iTunes to try and sync videos that it isn't supposed to be syncing.

Same problem here. It shows all the playlists, but the only songs there are the songs I bought at the ITunes Store. Strange thing is it says the iPhone contains 57 GB of music. Clicking on the video checkbox and unclicking it again had som result: it added 52 GB of 'Other' content to the iPhone, well at least in the bar in iTunes. Now ITunes doesn't keep hanging in step 5, but immediatly in step 1. Oh boy.

Strange thing is: even when I unplug the iPhone, it keeps syncing, or so it says in the topbar. Major bug. [Wifi-syncing isn't enabled.]

Edit: o well, maybe it was because iCloud back up was enabled. Don't know how that happened, I'm not very fond of clouds so I use them as little as possible.

I did a reset of all my settings on the iPhone. After that, the iPhone showed not only all my playlists, but also all the songs. Not playable, but with a download button behind them. As if it automatically was trying tot sync with iTunes Match (wich I have never used). It keeps getting stranger. But maybe there's a clue somewhere?

Did a factory reset. Unchecked the box 'Convert to AAC 256kb' so everything is now in Apple Lossless. Unchecked almost all the playlists. And checked only five or so. That worked. Lame hand from unchecking. And I know what I'll be doing the next few hours: getting all the settings right on the phone an unchecking all the feaures that cause the battery to drain. Well, it's getting a routine by now. Thanks Apple!

For what it's worth I did not have iCloud backup enabled our the convert to AAC option checked and was still having the problem.

I was having the same issue and I turned off my iTunes match and was able to sync my music. Hope this helps!

This is the exact problem I'm having, iPhone 6 Plus, iTunes 11.4. It just will not sync my music. It either sticks on "Waiting to copy items" or "Waiting for changes to be applied".

I've tried restoring phone to factory settings and setting up as new iPhone (not restore from backup) and I've tried deleting my iTunes Library and Preferences and re-adding media to a new, clean library, didn't help.

Last night I left it all night and when I came down it looked like all my music was there, except none of the albums had artwork and all the songs were greyed out and had stop buttons next to them, and couldn't be played.