iTunes says iPhone over capacity and won't sync

Hi Chris,

Following your suggestion, I'm sure works.

Not sure if it is the cable itself though, as while hunting for a second cable to do this, I decided to first remove the existing cable from its USB (still connected to iTunes and showing the iPhone) and try it in a different USB slot. This worked for me and everythi9ng reports as it should.

Paul.

I followed the instructions to the letter. TA DA! The restore then sync worked. Luckily, I have Time Machine and other backups JUST IN CASE. I'm back in business.

Finally found the fix.. (it worked for me)

iTunes needs to "recalculate capacity"

1. Connect the iPad, iPod, or iPhone to a computer
2. Launch iTunes
3. Hold the Power and Home button until the device forcibly reboots
4. Relaunch iTunes

...and that's all

eyewest - Thanks, that worked for me!

Thanks Chris, that worked immediately!

Just out of curiosity, after having tried with another cable and solved the problem, I tried with the previous, "problematic" cable again, and it worked fine.

Mystery.

S

Thank you eyewest! Your solution worked immediately.

Eyewest,

I could just kiss you! I haven't been able to sync for over a month because of this problem and your solution fixed it! I was ready to do a restore but it wanted to re-download ios 9.1 and that takes almost 4 hours. I had the backup but didn't want the hassle of the restore. This did it! Now all the bizarre "OTHER" space is gone and it is showing my correct available space! Thank you very much!

Thanks eyewest, I've had this issue off and on now for ages across multiple OS' and iTunes versions. So many other users with a similar problem you would think that Apple would of fixed this by now. At the very least they could give the same instructions as you do rather than the crap they copy/paste to everyone else. I'd like to see an Apple rep reply to this thread recognizing this issue.

That is so cool!! Thanks so much, have encountered this issue about 5 times in a little over a year. Previously a complete reset and re-adding the backed up file worked. So much quicker, thanks for sharing.

In my case, and I'm not sure how this happened...a lot of my albums/CD had all there items checked. For many of them, I only have a few songs I want synced...and I have unchecked a lot of songs. About 70% of all my full albums/CDs had all the **** songs checked. Took about 30 minutes for me to scan them all and uncheck undesired songs. That helped

Am having a similar issue. When syncing I get the following message (which clearly does not make sense) - "The iPhone “iPhone 6s” cannot be synced because there is not enough free space to hold all of the selected items (1 MB required, 2.61 GB available)."

Have tried all the suggested solutions without success

Very odd but no problems if I sync over wifi. Tried changing the cable I use, etc, but still problems if syncing via cable?

in my case, for some reason in itunes...songs that were previously unchecked were getting rechecked and i don't know why this was happening and it's still happening to this day.

another thread, someone suggested to create playlist and just sync songs from your playlist. initially, i was syncing my entire library. i had a ton of song unchecked and those wouldn't get synced to the phone. however, somehow....songs tend to be rechecked by itunes for some reason...and when i did a sync, i would have a "not enough room" error.

check out this thread: Re: why does my songs recheck themselves

eyewest you've solved my problem - cheers mate ✅

SOLVED my case. I tried many options listed on the forum but to no avail. I narrowed down the problem to the smart playlist 'Recently Played'. This has over 9k songs and if I had this playlist checked, I would get the 'not enough capacity' error while syncing. I edited the playlist settings to limit the content to lot less than 9k - for e.g., added filters such that # of plays is > 0, recently played in the last 12 months, etc. After doing so, I am able to sync successfully. I am guessing with an iOS update in the recent years, the criteria for the smart playlist got changed and could have affected syncing.