iPod Classic not recognised by iTunes - Can't sync.

I can confirm finally after much frustration that the iPod classic will not work with anything iTunes 12 and up. I ended up purchasing an old classic the other day thinking it would be incredibly cool to have, and I have now realized I purchased a lovely paper weight. I just got off the phone with apple and they have confirmed that the iPod classic will absolutely not work with the new iTunes. Attached is a picture of the chat just for explanation by the source. I've searched for hours trying to find a solution to this and I came up empty handed. Hope this helps.

It certainly does seem that Apple has, either through design or simply not-caring ... or most likely both, prevented our perfectly functional iPod classics from being able to sync with our libraries in iTunes 12 (painstakingly curated since 2002 and iTunes 2)

iTunes and the OS have the software necessary to communicate with the device. A healthy iPod classic should work fine with iTunes 12.6. See Corrupt iPod Classic. What are the HDD stats?

tt2

Hey there RossMilner,

It sounds like your iPod Classic is not being recognized in iTunes even after resetting it multiple times. Depending on your operating system, I recommend this section of the following article:

iPod not appearing in iTunes

Windows	iPod appears in Windows but not in iTunes iPod not recognized in 'My Computer' and in iTunes for Windows
Mac OS X	iPod not recognized in iTunes and Mac Desktop

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

Cheers,

Sterling

Thank you for using the Apple Support Community. Due to the nature of your issue you may find more information by using another one of Apple's support resources - https://getsupport.apple.com/GetproductgroupList.action.

I have an early iPod nano with the scroll wheel; not exactly sure which generation. It wasn't being recognized by iTunes 12. However, the advice above to connect the iPod, launch iTunes, then hold down the center button and the Menu button at the same time to reset it worked. The iPod icon appeared in the top left corner, to the right of the Music, Movies and TV Shows icon.

Same problem here:

My Macbook does seem to recognise my iPod Classic: it shows up as a device in Finder.

On the screen of the iPod Classic it says I'm connected.

However, in iTunes I see the 'busy/wait' thing for a little while and then it stops doing that; iTunes doesn't show the iPod an my iPod is no longer connected.

Although Apple is no longer selling iPod Classics, I hope this does;t mean that iTunes can no longer sync music to it?

I have a iPod classic 160Go purchased in sept 2014 (latest version -bran new). I was able to load it with over 10,000 songs + pictures... in Sept 2014. Since I installed Yosemite on my iMac 27 (late 2009 version), Itunes (12) won't recognize my iPod. I tried all the Apple suggestions... nothing.

I tried my iPod on my iMac 21 (mid 2011) and on my MacBook Pro Retina 13, (mid 2014), that all run under Yosemite with the same iTunes version (12), and all works perfectly on those (more recent) Macs; instant recognition...

I therefore believe it is something to do with the age of the Mac ?? and/or that there is a "missing something" in my iMac 27; and/Or iTunes 12 doesn't do the job on older Macs... ??

Several thousand users are having this issue after updating to yosmite when will there be a fix?

It's a Yosemite update that's causing the issue. If you use an older Mac it will more likely work. I'm guessing the Retina 13 hasn't done the update that's caused the issue. I have an iMac 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 16GB RAM running Yosemite 10.10.2 and as soon as the new Beta version loaded it wouldn't sync the iPod. I went to my 8 year old iMac which is running Snow Leopard and it works like a charm.

There are tens of thousands of us in the same boat.

APPLE, you need to provide a fix for iPod Classic users, ASAP. It's 2015 already...

I have this exact problem. It shows up in Finder but never in iTunes. It worked with Yosemite up until I installed the OS X NTP Security Update a week ago, and it is never recognized by iTunes anymore. I always safe ejected it and never had any issues up until now. Have a PC i'm going to install iTunes on to just to see if it works on there, but I don't see anything that should have caused my iPod to go bad when it was just bought a few months ago.

Same problem here with my Click Wheel iPod (4th gen) I hope this gets fixed quickly, I don't feel like using my windows pc to be able to sync my ipod.