Q: waiting for changes to be applied/waiting for items to copy stuck during sync

PROBLEM SOLVED:

OK I read about this solution on another site but here it is:

DELETE ALL DUPLICATE SONGS!

Select View - Show Duplicate items and then manually click on every duplicate (not both files just one of each song) and hit delete.

I had my iPhone stuck on sync 6 of 6 and as soon as I deleted 100 duplicates it starting working....

Here's my version of this problem. First the symptoms.

I start a Sync on my iPad Mini. Everything goes along fine until I get the message "Attempting to copy to the disk "My Disk" failed. An unknown error occurred (-4)." Once I click OK I get the message "Waiting for items to copy."

Now I noticed that it had finished syncing everything except books and had started syncing an updated book. I do not use iBooks on my Mac but I do use it on my iPad. To get books into iBooks, I mail the book to myself in epub format and Open In iBooks. I've been doing this since Mavericks introduced iBooks on the Mac. But we won't get into that here. There are lots of other threads on that.

I had recently loaded a new book and sure enough, when I removed that book from iBooks on my iPad, the problem disappeared. Maybe something changed in 10.10.2. I'm sure that if I reported it to Apple, they'd just tell me that I should be using iBooks on my Mac to handle books.

I don't have a solution other than removing the book from iBooks on my iPad and possibly moving to a new book reader. Haven't decided.

After a hear and a half struggling with this issue and having to restore my phone countless times and being afraid that the next sync is going to be the one to get stuck and erase all of my music I am finally pleased with the outcome of a suggestion on this forum. After deleting over 500 songs that were duplicates, I tried syncing. SUCESS! I didn't even have to restore my phone. The 70+GB of mysterious "other" data returned to its normal 1.75GB size and I have every single song from my iTunes on my iPhone. Thank you so much for suggesting this. Hopefully it solves the issue once and for all. -Jeff (iPhone 6, Yosemite)

Step 1 - Remove the after market USB cord

Step 2 - Plug in a genuine Apple USB cord

Problem solved, It worked for me - Simple

FIXED!!!!

I had the same problem with my iPhone 6

The way I fixed it was by:

-Unplug phone from iTunes

-Close iTunes

-Press and hold 'home' and 'power button' until Apple logo appears, then release

-Wait for phone to load

-Turn off wi-fi on phone

-Open iTunes

-Connect phone to iTunes via sync cable

-Sync phone to iTunes

Done

Hope this helps

Been fighting with this for months on my phone and 3 various iPads. Turning off iCloud Drive absolutely solved it on all 4.

This thread has helped a lot with my Apple issues. Ive had this problem since iPhone 4. This is what solved it for me:

Turn off iCloud Drive

Uncheck sync over wifi

Check manage music manually

Put device in airplane mode

Restart iTunes

Connect device with a lightning cable (I used a non Apple one)

Drag any album from iTunes to the device

Click sync

It took an hour or so for a 128gb iPhone 6 but it worked a treat and worked on a 64gb iPhone 5 too.

i usually had a problem when I told iTunes to fill the iPhone with music.  I could sync when I did not check that box in the music sync section.

Solution #2 worked for me after trying many different suggestions. Go figure, the easiest solution worked. Thanks!

I had this problem along with another one in iTunes, and I think they were related. My setup is Macbook Air on OS X Yosemite and iPad Air which started out on iOS 9.1. When I started iTunes on the Macbook it started displaying a message about not being able to connect to Store Purchases along with the need to open port 443 in Firewall. I did the iOS update to 9.2. When I started iTunes again I again got the alert message about Firewall. So I deleted, and added back, iTunes App in Firewall. That seems to have fixed the "waiting for changes" problem for me - I'm guessing the inability to connect to the store was because of the Firewall was my issue.