IOS 8 won't sync music with itunes

So mlb32704, is your iPhone on iOS 8.1 now?

If not, then simply Restore to the new iOS version in iTunes, and proceed with the other steps. That will give you a fresh iOS install, keep your apps and folders, and then should be able to resynch from there. The key for me was the three changes I made - the iOS version, the OS X version, and the iTunes version. The combination of the latest of each of those fixed it.

Good luck.

My iPhone has been on 8.1 before during and after your process and mine. Same thing for iTunes, version 12, before during and after.

I probably could have let your old process continue and it might have been successful. The problem was that I already had some but not all of my music on the phone, so I wasn't sure that syncing was going to solve my problems or potentially make them worse.

I've always had the current iOS, iTunes and in my case Windows versions (I'm kind of....focused when it comes to patches, updates, etc.). As soon as they make themselves known as released and available, I generally update right away. THANKFULLY I missed that ONE iOS update that was causing everyone grief, whew. In any case, I don't know if the problem lies with iOS or iTunes version, but the problems DEFINTELY have something to do with my music. So at a minimum I'm going to get rid of all music (less that one friggin' iTunes purchased track, ugh) THEN sync. That's what I'm trying to do right now, currently on 236 of 6443 songs which is the CORRECT total. And that is the first time I've seen that and I THINK it had something to do with simply unchecking the option to "Show All Music" again, from one of the steps in your process which I had not done in the past.

Then again, I did basically the same thing overnight last night and woke up to at least 10 error dialogue boxes to the effect of "couldn't connect to iPhone" or "error 54" or something like that. It's almost as if the iPhone doesn't like when I walk away and leave it alone for extended periods of time, that's when bad things seem to happen 🙂

Oh well, still syncing, again, see you in 12 hours 🙂 Thanks for your help today biffnixx.

So I'm working again this morning. This is what I did...

1.) Deleted all music off of the iPhone manually first and foremost, using the "Manage Storage" setting. That included playlists. One purchased track just refused to be deleted, I finally gave up and said good enough.

2.) Deleted all music off the iPhone "again" by unselecting the "Sync Music" tab under iTunes, and performing a sync.

3.) Did a manual backup of the iPhone in iTunes exactly as I liked it from a setup perspective (icons, groupings, settings, BT, etc.) with NO music on it.

4.) Synced all music back to the iPhone by selecting the "Sync Music" tab under iTunes, and performing another sync.

Note that under the Summary page for the device, the ONLY option that I have selected is to convert songs to the smaller bit rate, that's it. No automatic syncing. No manually manage music. Nothing else.

This morning's update - this morning to 6443 out of 6460 tracks successfully synced over 12 hours back from iTunes 12.0.1.26 to my iPhone 6 128GB iOS 8.1. That's close enough for me 🙂

Further reading for your entertainment...

Of course, all of my playlists were GONE. Oh my goodness. I manually deleted them off the phone last night as part of the whole "get rid of everything music before syncing again" process. Holy cow, we're talking many, many playlists, years of work.

Lightbulb - a bunch of other Apple devices floating around the house but only one, ONE, an iPad 2, had all of my playlists on it. Holy crap how friggin' LUCKY am I? Stupid stupid stupid! So I've added "back up playlists" to my regular IT self maintenance list. But I digress....

iTunes still has problems. Syncing still has problems. This was not a slam dunk and too early in the morning to start drinking. So I hooked up the iPad which immediately WANTED to sync, cancel that sync. Did a backup. Exported all of my playlist .xml files somewhere well outside of iTunes view and access, random folder somewhere tucked far far away on the computer. Imported said playlist .xml files back into my iTunes library. Whew, OK that works.

Now the hard part.

After days worth of getting "all" of my music back onto the iPhone, and SWEARING never again to use iTunes until these sync issues are fixed by Apple, here I am, about to sync again, to try and get the playlists back onto the phone. The alternative is manually rebuilding them one by one, track by track, that's way too much work, I'd be better off just biting the bullet and starting from scratch. Again 🙂

So I hit the sync button, and let the iPhone sync one more time, watching every step along the way. Got to the last step, copied seven "new" tracks that I'm guessing it had issues with overnight but somehow my overall total of 6443 stayed the same.

And the playlists copied. All of them. And they work. All of them. I've been playing music, all of my music, individual songs and from playlists, for a while now, it works.

I promise not to sync again until Apple fixes this once and for all, and I promise to help anyone who asks me for help. And thanks to biffnixx and all who got me here.

Thanks once again for the update. That's EXACTLY the process I went through to get my sync to finally work. I'll have to check to see if I'm missing any songs. I think it was only two and I "re-purchased" them on my phone to get them on there vs. attempting another sync. I never had any issues with my playlists copying though. Glad you were able to work it out.

My question is do you have any further plans to discuss this with the Apple support team? What you've done thus far is the furthest I believe anyone has gotten with Apple in acknowledging/addressing the issue. I know they are the world's most secretive company but I would love some assurance that they are indeed working on the issue.

Note that syncing music seems to be a two-step process. The names/locations of the music are transferred as shown in itunes, but during that phase the actual song transfers are queued. The possibly very long "waiting for changes to sync" mode is when the rest of the songs themselves actually copy to the i-device. So don't interrupt that. I leave mine syncing overnight for example for my 70,000 songs.

Now I have a different problem, which is that the songs are copied but the playlists are not. Hopefully can figure that out...

Interesting. It does seem as though everyone having issues has a relatively large library. Unfortunately I have left mine syncing overnight and all I had in the morning was a very hot phone. Haha. I currently have all my music on my phone. My issue lies in trying to add a few more songs and then syncing. It will not add the new album. It will delete my songs, change my Other file, and force me to manually delete everything and start over with a 5 hour+ sync. ALL I WANTED TO DO IS ADD 8 SONGS!

Wow, sorry to hear that - not the same problems I'm seeing.

My phone does seem happier (no crashes so far but it's still early) after doing a restore. I had upgraded from 8.0 to 8.0.1 and then 8.1 using the OTA upgrade option on my phone. Was having crashes. Then I did a full restore which reinstalled 8.1 from scratch and things seem happy but playlists won't sync (the actual songs do sync). Hopefully the last problem to sort out...

I finally have the solution to why iPhone 6 plus was not loading any songs from iTunes, which an Apple Support Rep told me. Go to Itunes/Preferences/Store/ and UNCHECK the box next to "automatically download album artwork". It seems that was hanging everything up. I have all of the artwork download already & it comes through fine once the songs load into the phone. Hope that solves everyone else's issue with not being able to synch iPhone 6 plus with iTunes (I am using OS X Yosemite on the MAC).

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be my issue on my 128gb 6. I already had this unchecked.

Bummer - I noticed that when I first was able to load some songs, I had just checked some playlists which loaded about 2700 songs in. Once that was successful, I selected all of the artists that I wanted to load in which would bring the total songs to about 10,000 on the iPhone 6 plus 128 GB. That seemed to get stuck, so at this point I'm only loading a few artists at a time & it seems to be working. Maybe it doesn't like loading such a large amount of songs at one time. See if loading just a few hundred songs or so at one time makes it work.

There seem to be two categories of users here:

1) Those who go through a complete reboot/rebuild of the phone and iTunes, often including the computer itself and file folders, and then try to avoid messing with the files, an impossible task IMHO.

2) Those (such as myself) who have found some random set of box clicks in iTunes that manages to kick the Sync triggers into a state where it launches and sometimes can synchronize something. Or it doesn't, and like a circus chicken looking for another grain of corn, I start clicking boxes trying to get SOMETHING to happen.

Each of these categories of users then has to revisit/repeat their efforts to maintain or recover some basic synchronizing capability. "It worked before when I did this! Gads, what was that, write down the steps and repeat exactly..."

either way it bites and needs to be solved.

Sorry for the belated response....I've tried to actually have a LIFE outside of working on these issues for about a month now 🙂

The answers to the questions are - the AppleCare contact assigned to my case is a very nice, knowledgeable individual who has all but told me that Apple is aware of the situation and some amount of resources are being dedicated towards resolving "the issues", whatever they might be. In my humble opinion, Apple knows that there are multiple issues here but not enough people are having them, so either it's going to take some time to have them own up to and resolve them, or it's never going to happen and we're going to have to fix them on our own. Sorry. That's my opinion. Apple has this uncanny ability to make you feel warm and fuzzy about a disastrous situation. I mean, what REALLY are our alternatives here? Trade in our iPhones for a Samsung? Come on, we're all heavily vested in apps, it would be a monumental task to actually "leave", plus I've seen the other side (Android), I'll take my chances with Apple getting their act together on this issue. Someday.

Clear as mud? Basically, my Apple guy tells me they're working on it, they're capturing data from both within Apple and from external sources (as in customers such as ourselves), but they have no idea what's going on. That was at least a week ago when we last spoke. I have an open case with no follow up activities planned. He told me basically NOT to sync, I chose to sync once, paid for it for 36 hours, got it back to functional, haven't synced since. Oh I have synced a pair of iPad 2s, and yes, they're having the issue too, and I'm still working on them. On my own.

It's getting harder each and every day to feel good about Apple, the purchase of my iPhone 6, the support that I/we are getting on these issues, and the prospects of these issues getting resolved any time soon.

NOTE TO SELF -- never ever be on the bleeding edge (this is my first time! Yay! So far so good, are we having fun yet?).

Get it working (I like Norm's #2 advice, just random clicks till you get there), back it up, DON'T SYNC, that's my best advice to everyone!

#CIRCUSCHICKENS

LOVE it.

If I turn off iTunes Match on the iPhone 6 I am able to manually drag and drop songs from iTunes onto the iPhone 6. "Manually manage videos" becomes "Manually manage music and videos" in the summary page.

Also the Music page in iTunes for the iPhone 6 now displays the older style panel where you can sync "Entire Music Library" or "Selected playlists, artists, albums and genres.

Turn off Itunes Match on the phone.

Hello Apple!!! when is this going to get fixed? I am just about to restore my iPhone 6 for the 5th time. I had 93gb of music on my phone, decided to put a movie on my phone and iTunes deleted everything. Again. I am quite p'd off. This is an Apple website forum. I'd like some one from Apple to give me a response. This is getting quite ridiculous. All these check, uncheck solutions clearly haven't worked nor should we have to even do it. It should just work like it used to. Why is this happening??? I need answers??????