Sync issues iPhone iOS 9.2 with iTunes 12.3 ElCap 10.11.2

Yes, I have a similar if not the same issue with my iPhone 6 with iOS 9.2 and MacBook with El Capitan and iTunes 12.3. I am trying to get some play lists on my iPhone, one of which is recently added and the recent purchases in iTunes are not showing up in the iPhone, but the tracks are all there in iTunes. I have tried unchecking and re-checking the play lists and tried rebooting the phone but no joy. I am now going through a complete remove everything (music) and re-sync music in iTunes over a USB cable (but phone also set up to sync over WiFi.

The Sync seems to finish far too quickly and nothing changed, after the remove the tracks that were originally there are still there and the new tracks still show as unavailable and after re-syncing back on, the new recently added music is still not there. I am only trying to sync 574 tracks.

It actually never gets past step 1 of 3, then just stops immediately.

This time it's taking much much longer. It's stuck on step 7 of 7 waiting for changes to apply, but there is no spinning sync arrows on the iPhone and the music on the phone hasn't changed. All I did differently was reboot the macbook. But I don't think it's fixed it. I'm going to bed and leaving it running overnight. This is ********, iTunes sync should be absolutely core functionality on Apple devices, it's bread and butter, almost where they started, something so fundamental shouldn't be broken and should a high priority for testing whenever anything is changed.

Left it overnight and iTunes had a message on screen this morning saying that the iTunes purchase could not be completed at this time as there is a problem with the store, please try again later. I get this all the time when trying to sync this iPhone. I'm not trying to purchase anything, the purchases have been made on iTunes but are not syncing to the phone. It's still stuck on step 7 of 7 and won't complete. I need help to fix this as I can't get any new purchases onto my phone.

I found this selection of links too if it helps anyone else reading. It didn't help me though.

It seems that, in iTunes v. 12.3, I cannot transfer my music CDs to my iPhone 6. Why and how can I do this.

But did you have to stay logged out of iCloud or if you logged back in after all the music was sync'd back to the phone, did it then sync as normal or has the issue come back now you are logged back in to iCloud?

OK. When I view my songs and playlists on my iPhone, most of my playlists if I try and delete them only have the option to remove from 'My Music' one had the option to 'Remove from iPhone' so I just removed that one from iPhone, when I looked at the songs, a lot were greyed out and had no phone icon next to them, when I selected delete for those ones they only had the option to remove from My Music so I didn't do that because when I tried to delete the songs that had black text and a phone icon next to them I got both options and is said this song has been downloaded to this device do you want to 'Remove from device' or remove from 'My Music' fearing that removing from My Music might delete it from my iTunes library on my Mac as well I selected just to remove from device. So I've gone through and deleted everything from device as far as I can tell, individually one by one as I couldn't find a remove all tracks from device option. Also, as the message said this has been downloaded to phone I assume none of the tracks on the device were actually synced by iTunes over wifi or the USB cable, the message makes me think they were all downloaded over wifi or mobile data from the iCloud.

Also, I don't know what sort order the tracks were in but every time I removed a track the list resorted in a different order. Very strange indeed. In fact the next track on the list from the one I was removing appeared in the list as a track on the phone so with icon and not greyed out, but after the track I was removing was deleted that track would appear at the top of the list as greyed out and no icon, then as I approached the end of the list all of a sudden it went from several tracks remaining (didn't notice how many but went off the bottom of the screen) to just 3. It's as though the allocation table or index was corrupted or something and by deleting the tracks it forced it to update and correct itself. In face, while those last 3 tracks were on the screen I typed this message and the screen locked, when I went back in the music list was empty and showed a blank screen with the message "Don't Miss a Beat Find your favourites in iTunes then come back and enjoy them here". When I then select show all music it shows a list of only 25 tracks all of which are greyed out so not on the phone.

Maybe it's only these tracks that are in the iCloud because my storage is about full, but I've never selected iTunes match and don't think I use the cloud for iTunes.

So after I removed all the tracks I did a sync with iTunes on the mac again and it started at step 2 of 7, then I went and did something else. Came back to it and the sync had finished but still no music on my phone. I am still logged out of iTunes account on the phone (head and shoulders icon top left) and in iTunes status bar next to the sync button it thinks I have 5.5MB 7 tracks of audio on my phone.

So it's still screwed.

And after all that I thought, I'll turn off music sync again in iTunes and eject the device, power it off, power it back on again, turn on music sync again and see what happens.

Initially the status bar said that there was 3.8GB of music on the phone 581 tracks (despite the top of the screen saying 574 - diff 7 tracks from earlier) but the sync bombed out at step 3 of 7 and nothing was transferred to phone and the status bar next to sync button went back to 5.5 MB and 7 tracks of audio on the device and still no music on the iPhone.

I signed in to iTunes again in the My Music app on the phone and this time the blank screen message asks if I'm going off grid and asks me to download music to my device.

I don't want to download FFS, I just want to sync my music from iTunes to the iPhone. Why is this so freakin hard FFS.

OK. This time I thought of going back to the iTunes preferences so I logged out of iTunes on the phone again, and in iTunes settings on the Mac I turned off automatic downloads under the store tab of preferences for Music and Apps which were the only 2 that were turned on and turned off always check for new downloads, but left on the sync play count across devices.

When the sync started it got to step 5 of 5 pretty quickly then started transferring x of 574 tracks, but it remains to be seen if they actually transfer because it seemed to be doing that the other night when I left it and the tracks never showed up.

I'm surmising at the moment that if you want to auto download tracks between devices without having to do a sync then that is now a feature of Apple Music and you can't have that enabled unless you sign up to Apple Music.

Hoorah, the sync finished pretty quickly and everything appears to be back on my phone. So it's the automatic download that's the problem.

I wonder if I can now log back into my iTunes account because I assume I'll need to to make download purchases on my phone and then have them sync back up to my MacBook iTunes.