iTunes Keeps Syncing

Let me share what I have found with this - it has been a nightmare thanks to Apple's sloppy implementation of the new "Work" field.

The constant sync'ing is indeed because of the "Work" field being populated, For mp3's, the Work field in iTunes is stored in the "TIT1" frame, aka CONTENTGROUP. If you are using CONTENTGROUP in a 3rd party tagger to store mood & style keywords and have enjoyed seeing them import into iTunes' Grouping field for referencing in smartplaylists, those days are over, that data is now in "Work". And Work is nothing but problems and causes constant resyncing issues, etc., and however long it takes Apple to fix this is irrelevant, you probably want Grouping to work again like it used to. iTunes now read/writes Grouping to a new mp3 id3 frame called "GRP1". So if you want to retain all your hard-earned mood & style keywords that used to be in Grouping, you need to find a 3rd party tagger that supports both the TIT1 (CONTENTGROUP) frame and the new GRP1 (iTunes Grouping) frame. You can then copy CONTENTGROUP to GRP1 before getting rid of CONTENTGROUP which is now useless for anything but what it was designed for, the Classical "Work". Fortunately a couple of taggers have started supporting both tags... Mp3tag calls it "GROUPING". And thanks to Mp3tag's recent update, my iTunes library and syncs are functional again. Here are the steps:

1) use 3rd party tagger to copy "CONTENTGROUP" to "GROUPING", and delete CONTENTGROUP tag.

2) go into iTunes, select all files, Get Info, check "use work and movement", clear out Work field. Uncheck "use work and movement", update. This is the initial first step needed to get all that pesky CONTENTGROUP stuff out of Work in iTunes' library and stop the madness. Should not have to ever repeat this step unless you ever import songs into iTunes with CONTENTGROUP populated in the future.

3) re-import all affected songs into iTunes's library. Sometimes iTunes is flakey about reimporting into existing fields and ignores your attempt, there are iTunes "refresh library from file" scripts out there to ensure all fields are refreshed from the file tags, use them. Grouping should now be populated and Work empty. Constant resyncing should cease, and all references to Grouping in Smartplaylists should work again like they used to.

As long as any songs are imported into iTunes with CONTENTGROUP, aka TIT1 frame, aka "Work" populated, the problem will return. As long as songs are imported into iTunes with GROUPING, aka GRP1 frame populated, iTunes Grouping will work, and won't constantly resync.

Thank you! I feel this finally worked. I did not follow all your instructions but you pointed me in the right direction.

Background. In the early years of iTunes and iPods/iPhones, with space a premium, I was using the "Grouping" field to filter out my songs that were doubles. I have all the Big Shiny Tunes CD's in addition to some of the original CD's/Songs by the artists. I did not want the same song on the 2GB iPod (early years as I said). So I would write "Double" in the Grouping. I never cleared this field over the years and quite frankly forgot it was even populated.

What I did:

1) Made a copy of iTunes library

2) Sorted iTunes Library on "Grouping"

3) Selected all songs that contained any values (in my case "Double, NOT, iPod)

4) Command I (for information)

5) Clicked on "Use work and movement" check box

6) Cleared "work" field by setting values to null or blank

7) Unchecked "Use work and movement"

8) Clicked on "Grouping" field

9) Cleared all values setting it to null or blank

10) Click Ok and let iTunes update these fields

Repeat the 10 steps for "Work" field ensuring all songs are null or blank in the "Grouping" and "Work"

Tested this on my iPad and iPhone SE by playing some of the songs that had those fields populated. On three different sync no songs have been re-synced / copied to my devices.

I realize this is a work around and not everyone is going to have this issue if they have never used the Grouping field before. It works for me and I hope it works for you!

Cheers!

-sean

You may find the keep syncing songs are those that have custom lyrics.

Try unchecking the box "Sync only ticked songs and videos".

I think you may be right. Apple makes it extremely hard to see just what is going on during syncing (medium gray text on light gray background? Come on, Apple) but it does seem that my songs that are repeating all have "Custom Lyrics."

Since "Custom Lyrics" is new to the latest version of iTunes, that means it is a bug that needs to be resolved by the Apple "geniuses". How do we report this. I don't think they read these posts.

My suggestion to uncheck the box "Sync only ticked songs and videos" does not appear to work, but once songs are played they do not repeatedly sync. I am unsure how to report the problem (that appears to require a fix) as the Contact Support function appears to be for other types of problems.

Yes, I think this is what's wrong since the latest updates. All songs that keep syncing on my iPhone are the ones where I added lyrics. The only solution for me is to rip these songs again, so that they don't contain lyrics anymore. I don't seem to be able to delete the lyrics in iTunes, once they are there! Very annoying, this...