“I remember the days when I’d get a new CD, rip it to my iTunes library, connect my click-wheel iPod, and have the music sync in less than a minute,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Macworld. “Ah, the good old days were so much better…”
“Now, syncing an iOS device — iPhone, iPad, or iPod — is too often an ordeal. And it is because it’s become untrustworthy,” McElhearn writes. “Will the sync work at all or will your content disappear and be transformed into something that fills the amorphous “Other” category in iTunes’ capacity bar. Will all of your content sync or just your music, or music, or apps?”
“In its current state, iTunes syncing is broken and it can only be fixed by Apple,” McElhearn writes. “Here are some of the most common sync problems, and, in some cases, solutions or workarounds to get media files onto your iOS device.”
Read more in the full article here.
I read this article early this morning. Personally, I haven’t had any of the problems he describes except the mysterious “other” data that eats up some of my space. I use iTunes Match to get music onto my iPhone and iPad, but I plug in to sync movies, audio books, or any other content that would take a long time to load over my wifi network. I guess I’m using a hybrid of cloud and physical connections.
The “other” pops up for me if I try to autocompress Apple Lossless to iTunes plus. The only way I can avoid the problem is to convert files to iTunes plus within iTunes and then copy to my phone.
Trying to convert a large number of audio files while syncing to the iPhone effectively bricks the phone; the only way out is to restore to factory settings and start over. No fun at all. Apple really needs to figure out that some people have large collections of lossless audio.
Consider yourself very fortunate. Many of us avoid music match because we have cellular data plans to worry about. By the way, you are expanded other is probably do to streamed music getting stuck there.
ITunes has been screwed up for years! It got really bad when iOS 7 came out and I had to restore my phone about every three weeks just to control the expansion of “other” and to stop songs from vanishing.
Since iTunes 12 and iOS 8 syncing audiobooks has become a hit or miss operation, sometimes requiring up to four separate attempts.
Sometimes when I try to stream video to the phone the video gets stuck in “other” the only way to remove it is by wiping the phone and restoring from a good backup.
ITunes never gets updates it only gets facelifts. Apparently the programmers feel that if we’re sufficiently confused by the new interface we won’t notice that all the old bugs are still there.
Obviously complaining here won’t do a bit of good, we have to send all our complaints directly to Apple using apple.com/feedback.
Sounds like you’ve been going through a lot of bull crap for years. Honestly, I don’t have the problems you describe and never have. As for iTunes Match, I’m on a 4GB data plan that is shared with another user on my account. I’m usually within range of a wifi connection, so I don’t use much data. iTunes Match doesn’t seem to consume a lot anyway. When I signed up for it, I took note of the increase in cellular data usage. It was negligible.
It hasn’t been fun, but some of the comments I get from Applecare have mitigated the pain a bit. One problem I had consisted of the iCloud icon showing up next to music videos even though they were loaded onto the phone. I spoke to a senior adviser at Apple who outright didn’t believe me. I put my phone into airplane mode, went to the videos app Took a screen shot and sent it to him. There was the airplane icon in the upper left-hand corner and a bunch of videos with cloud icons to their right, which is impossible.
His comment very likely didn’t conform to Apple’s tech support guidelines! 🙂 He emailed the screen shot to the engineering department and that bug was squashed in the next update.
I’ve had the problem described: I’ve had songs I’ve purchased on the iTunes store disappear from my iPhone. I can redownload them, or resynch, but if I’m in an area without internet access, I’m screwed. Apple needs to fix this problem!
Something corrupted my iTunes the other day and I’ve ended up with songs having been relabelled, pictures added as tracks from iTunes extras content, tv shows showing up as music tracks with labels from albums. Complete pain. You’d that such an important part of Apple’s business would be the most robust thing they do.
Hence we back up our hard drives. iTunes has been flakey for years and I’ve had to drag my iTunes folder from my backup to my boot drive a few times.
Perhaps it’s like the problems with iPhoto. Eventually, I had to break up my photos into smaller libraries because the database could not manage properly. Now I keep my photos in libraries by year.
The iTunes dabs may be reaching its practical limits if you have a huge number of items in it.
There are a ton of things broken in iTunes. I could write a large book on some of the things that are broken and how to fix them. Here are a few, summarized (search online for details, or ask if you can’t find them).
Starting with your iPhoto problem:
Sync freezes or crashes on photos:
Try deleting the iPod Photo Cache on your Mac, and allowing it to rebuild.
Sync only works via WiFi:
Try swapping out your USB cable or even plugging it in to another USB port, directly on your computer.
Sync fails on music
Check library for duplicate purchased items or duplicate iCloud errors.
Falsely out of capacity
Remove items, resync, and then add them back. Try removing a very large game or other app. The problem here is that iTunes doesn’t delete and then add. It adds, and then deletes. If you’re doing a large sync of large apps, it may go over capacity due to having both the new and old version of the app.
Won’t sync over WiFi or USB
Restart iOS device. Restart Mac.
Won’t sync reliably over WiFi despite strong/stable connectivity
Welcome to the club.
“Other” size is insane
This can happen when a sync has failed. Try rebooting the device and following the above to restore a successful sync.
“Other” size is extremely large despite successful sync
This one could be an entire book in of itself, but the things to try (in order) would be:
1) Check for data files in apps. For example, if you have a 3rd party movie app and that app has a bunch of large video files, that’s going to show up as Other.
2) Check for Software Update file, if present delete or update.
3) Sync without music, photos, or apps selected removing these, and then select these to sync again (adding them back)
4) If you’re jailbroken, run iCleaner.
5) Restore from Backup.
6) Delete old texts, especially those with media. If you’re jailbroken, there’s a better way to do this.
7) if you’re jailbroken, search for corrupt media databases. If a sync fails, it can corrupt a database, but instead of over-writing it when it restores a new database, it can still be present on your device. You can search for this, remove it, and then resync. This has happened with me with both photos and music.
8) If you’re jailbroken, use the terminal or ssh to find large files. Search for files over say 100mb and look for things that don’t make sense.
9) Go nuclear… Restore as New. Full Restore.
AGREED!!! Apple, iTunes has lost it’s way…bring it home!!!!
So true!!!! My iPhone 6 plus is giving me hell…. Syncing to my iTunes library. Also getting a 49Gb “other” occupying space on my phone…. I’ve being at the Genius Bar and on the phone with costumer service at Apple. And they haven’t been able to help me. I just keep resetting my phone as new and the same thing happen again. Only the song that I have bought from iTunes load up. Help Please!!!!
To remove the large amount of “other” check and uncheck
Sync automatically in iTunes preferences. The wiping and recovering from backup will also work but is exhaustive and I’m always afraid my contacts and info will be lost. Hope that helps until Apple gets someone to fix the tentacles in iTunes
iTunes is long overdue for a break-up. It’s trying to do too much. At least Apple should split the iOS functions from the entertainment functions.
I have had all of these problems–with my iPhone 5 and my new 6+. My wife will not connect to iTunes under any circumstance for her 5S. Best to use one of the after-market programs for transfers, and don’t ever trust iTunes to do this.
Of course my experience is anecdotal, but there is a lot of truth to this article from what I have seen. JUST YESTERDAY, iTunes sync got all confused and hosed up my iPhone 6. The “other” category kept saying it was some ridiculous size of about 47 GB, and whatever I tried wouldn’t clear it until I reset my iPhone back to factory conditions. What a hassle….
I agree, iTunes sync is a crapshoot whether via wifi or tethered.
Try living with silence. It is wonderful.
Yes, I have found it impossible to sync my iPhone 5 or my new iPhone 6 Plus. Same thing for my wife–she has not synced for years to iTunes–just to 3rd-party programs. That’s definitely the best way to go. It still leaves me the task of building playlists directly on the phone, but how is it that all of these 3rd-party programs are able to accomplish this yet Apple can not?
Because they are only doing one job.
My iTunes got confused last night.. Couldn’t sync my iPhone 6 at all..
Even plugged into my iMac it couldn’t find it.. Yet iexplorer and phoneview could.
Restarted iTunes..
Restarted iPhone..
Didn’t work.
Restarted iMac plugged iPhone back in, asked if I wanted to trust the computer… Still shows my iPad at 100% and connected, yet I know it isn’t and last night it was at 28% when I put it down.
Most of the time iTunes works just fine, but the days it doesn’t…
My iTunes is OK but it seems like Apple software quality in general is getting worse. Have you ever the latest iMovie? How about ios 8.0 or OSX 10.10.0? It seems to be getting worse not better. My new rule is wait for the first update to a new release before even considering installing. Steve is probably rolling over in his grave as Apple software quality trends closer to that of windows.
The perception (and fact) of “Software getting worse” is a direct correlation to the increased complexity that must be managed by that software. 10 years ago, iTunes had 2 or 3 devices to know about. Now it has dozens upon dozens. That’s gotta be a tricky process to manage effectively.
You and I have not experienced the frustration that the other people on this forum are posting about. That frustration must be particularly bad when you are dealing with Apple products which are just supposed to work.
But I would like to know more about these problems – the percentage of users who are encountering these bugs. There are likely some factors or combination of factors which these people have in common.
Apple isn’t a poor company and can afford to hire the quality programmers needed to fix iTunes. They just haven’t.
iTunes is a mess these days.
It’s as if the designers know exactly how all the buttons and dials work, so they went ahead and designed something for them.
For example, I’ve reduced by half the number of podcasts I subscribe to, simply because of the sync problem. Do I still listen to that missing half? Sure. I download them to my desktop and listen from there.
As for the “OTHER” problem, it’s still there. Not with my 64 gb 5G Touch. But the Other category eats up my 16 gb iPad Mini.
Apple, sad to say, would rather blaze bold new trails into the future than fix the problems of today…and yesterday.
I wish I knew what was going on here. I’ve rarely had any problems with sync and, when I did, it was because I did something stupid. I’ve learned from each one of those and it’s really solid now.
I have a friend that always does “absolutely nothing wrong” and have issues like the ones described here. I want to help, but it seems like solving the same problems over and over again. I ask “What’d you do so that we figure out how to not have this happen again.” They don’t like to hear me use the same exact phrasing they’ve used over and over on tech calls 🙂
What can you do wrong? You tell iTunes what to do and it either does it or it doesn’t. If it does it then it’s working, if not, it’s broken.
If I tell iTunes to sync x audiobooks and remove y audiobooks and that isn’t the result of the sync, then iTunes is broken.
I find it very annoying when the few who don’t have problems automatically assume all is perfect at Apple and the people having problems are doing something wrong.
iTunes has been screwed up for years and needs more attention than an interface change every so often. Apple needs put some great programmers on both iTunes and iOS in order to get the two working together properly.
It really sucks to try and sync a few things to an iDevice and worry that the sync will fail and cost many hours of time to do a complete restore, and even they occasionally fail. I started a restore one night after restarting both the computer and iPhone and woke up with no media on the phone. It was actually there but all of it got loaded into “other” memory.
It’s a bug-ridden piece of software and Apple is doing nothing to fix it. Stupid, because it’s the one piece of software that might convince Windows users to consider trying a Mac, and if the Windows version is as buggy as the Mac version, that won’t happen.
Totally agree! To get my entire music library to sync requires me to make selections in the sync preferences that make no sense. Getting movies to sync is another nightmare… Apple, please fix this!
What works best for me is to sync playlists manually! What doesn’t work is the white background my eyeballs hurt! Jesus Mary Joseph is it to much to ask for the option light or dark background! I still have 10.7 on another computer and it is a better experience with cover flow and dark background!
Funny, I was syncing all my music over and decided to change to playlists. After the sync all my music was still there, but only three playlists had synced. The Genius playlist and two playlists I had Unchecked! After a while on the phone with Apple tech support trying lots of things that didn’t work, I gave up, wiped my phone back to factory specs, grabbed a good backup from a backup drive and did a complete restore. The following sync cooperated.
Restores shouldn’t be part of regular maintenance but unfortunately have been since iOS 7.
I dont use iTunes much, it has been chaos for a long time.
It’s a symptom of a larger problem, Apple trying to do far too much too quickly. I don’t have time to write down and report all of the issues regarding synching across the board.
Currently: creating a calendar event on my iPhone, and it never does appear on the iPhone, but appears immediately on my iPad and OSX calendar.
There is an old WWII movie called A Bridge Too Far, Apple managment needs to see it, and learn from it.
iOS is the biggest problem, but increasingly OSX is becoming infected too.
When my iPhone contract is up, I am going to downgrade to the cheapest iPhone with the bare minimum amount of synched items. My iPad will be replaced with a Macbook Air because things like iWork for iOS are just worthless. And hopefully my good old Mac Mini will not be messed with too much. All my productivity work revolves around OSX 3rd party apps for content creation, and I am going to cut the cord to iOS as much as is practical.
I realize this thread relates to iTunes, but there are much bigger issues than just iTunes.
Mac user since 1988.
The opposite of intuitive: with two devices plugged in (iPhone and iPad) they show up as mini icons under devices in the left column, yet when you want to sync one, pressing a device mini icon does nothing. You must use a generic mobile device icon on the upper menu bar to select from a drop down menu and then select “summary” under the “settings” list in the left column. Illogical and counterintuitive. Actually worse than unintuitive because you are baited to press the mini icons in the left column but that doesn’t work. Let’s move on to app syncing shall we: let’s say you want to rearrange your apps on your iPhone so they are on a different order/are moved around to different pages. Which step do most people want to execute, changing the page sequence or moving apps around…. Moving apps around. I’ve never once wanted to change the page sequence… So, you plug your iPhone in, some,how navigate to sync preferences for your apps. Now you see a nice layout of all your phone app pages (screen pages). You find the app you want to move. Ahh, there it is… “Stocks” (for all you fan boys). So you click the mouse on stocks and drag the app to the first page…. Wait, the page moved not the app…. THATS NOT INTUITIVE AT ALL. WTF. Everyone said it would be…. No, you have to double click the page, then grab the app and drag it to the new page. But the page is underneath this enlarged page now so you must drag it out of the way until the origin page shrinks again and then move it to the destination page. Why this idiotic code? So stupid. Just activate the page number so when the mouse is hovering over the page number it moves the page. Let us single click an app and drag it to the new page without all these extra steps. Folks, this is PC/Microsoft programming, period. Extra steps, unintuitive processes, and Cook is out of the office and not replying. Tim Cook… Get out of the hardware office, walk across the hall into software, and never leave again as CEO. FIX ALL THIS NONSENSE.
These sort of problems seem to be a corrupted file(s) in iOS rather than iTunes. It would be a serious pain to reinstall. Fortunately I have never had a problem with iTunes. Now iPhoto on the other hand – try moving the Library to an NAS…
FWIW, here’s a bugfix suggestion I submitted to Apple, which contains many of the same suggestions mentioned in this articule:
Dec 28, 2014 12:13 PM
Re: waiting for changes to be applied/waiting for items to copy stuck during sync
in response to kamilskii
I got hit with this Bug, too. Will list my stats: new iPhone 6 Plus, upgraded to iOS 8.1.2, Mac OS X 10.8.5, current iTunes (12.0.126). Unlike many of the helpful posts here, almost none of the suggestions would apply in my case. I determined that the reason for this status message, in my case, was iTunes was waiting to copy about six Apps that were either incompatible or corrupted. I am still working through completing a full sync, but I’d like to make some observations:
In iTunes, there are very few clues available to us to help diagnose the problem. I note that if you select the device icon, the one that will display in the thumbnail the name of the iPhone, and the capacity, next to the spinning arrows, you will likely also see a warning triangle. That is the only clue I had that the program was actually reporting a problem. Clicking on the icon brings up a window (which you can’t resize), which will tell you the error(s) iTunes has encountered, but it’s up to you to reach the proper conclusion. In my case, deleting/uninstalling the problem Apps allows me to proceed to the next sync phase.
Apple simply needs to add better diagnostic and troubleshooting tools into iTunes. This Sync problem has been reported since iOS 5, and while it doesn’t look like this issue will go away anytime soon, giving advanced users access to better information would remove the ‘mystery’ behind these kinds of errors and expedite troubleshooting, and maybe even a bug fix from Apple’s developers.
– Add a ‘Verbose’ method to iTunes Sync for Advanced Users. This way you can actually monitor the progress of your sync, and make a diagnosis if something goes wrong.
– Allow the Triangle Error window to be resizable so you can read more about the errors.
– Have iTunes save this error window as a Log, which you can access from a menu, or export later.
– Add a checkbox under the Summary page that will allow iTunes to Skip syncing any file class, such as Apps, pictures, music, etc., so the Sync doesn’t get hung up (and add this status it to the Sync log).
– Add the ability to uncheck Apps Sync (unless I missed this feature) so you can isolate this function when troubleshooting sync. You can uncheck syncing music and videos, but not Apps. Why?
– Someone else reported a Diagnostic menu item in an earlier version of iTunes. I don’t remember seeing this feature, but if it was there, Apple should put this back.
– Offer a ‘repair’ option for iTunes internal DBs/backups.
Many good suggestions.
When you mentioned why Apple does not allow turning off syncing Apps it got me thinking.
You have free Apps and PAID Apps. Hmmm. You have Apps that have been optimized for various iOS versions. Then a new iOS comes along and does it try to sync Apps that may not compatible, whether you neglected updates, or the App creator did not complete the latest version? I don’t know.
Then add in the mix generations of Apple hardware combined with Christmas purchase of the latest and greatest, the iCloud and the numerical combinations increase.
Certainly this is a challenge for Apple to harmonize syncing across the universe of hardware and software.
But I am cutting them no slack. The top tech and richest company in the history of the planet MUST get their house in order! We expect nothing less …
Apple user since Lisa.
UPDATE: I have tested iTunes v.12 sync with three iPhones:
iPhone 5 with iOS 6: sync completes without error.
iPhone 5S with iOS 7: sync completes without error.
iPhone 6 Plus with iOS8: sync hangs at the ‘Waiting’ status.
Either Apple needs to issue a bugfix or an update to iTunes to accommodate an iPhone 6 Plus device, iOS8, or both.
Sometimes when I connect my 5S to the MacBookPro to update apps or transfer new songs to the phone, (I don’t need or use the cloud) somehow all my ringtones are set back to default. Then I have to select the Tones and reinstall all the ringtones to undo this. It doesn’t always happen but I agree iTunes sync isn’t as quick, easy and foolproof as before. And the “waiting for” is taking way too long…
After 10 years of using iTunes, I finally hit a limit at about 12,000 songs. Recently I added 5 CD’s over Christmas, and tried to add some of the songs to my playlist. After two days I could not, because they had to be in “iCloud” because I have iTunes match. iCloud would not upload them, no matter which trick I tried. Finally I delete all iTunes caches in my Library and restarted my Mac. And 24 hours later they synched. Now is that “seamless”, heck no. Apple needs to fix this or have us all be on someone else hardware. Frustrated original Mac (1984) user and loyal since, but getting really fed up.
Fed up is a good way to put it. Seems the hardware releases from Apple are stunning and timely. But pushing out almost yearly versions of OSes that are half-baked is begging for trouble.
Amen! As soon as I heard about the OSs being put on a yearly schedule I knew there would be trouble, and here it is!
There are hardware problems too. A two year old top-of-the-line Mac Mini outperforms the current top-of-the-line Mac Mini by a wide margin. That’s just sad.
I’ve been using it since version 1. Have had very few problems. I’m up to 130 GB of music now, have 5 of us in the family, various iPods, iPhones and one iPad sync to it on many different Macs. I house the music on a Mac server so the music is on a shared volume on each Mac. Definitely a complicated setup, but never had any of these issues.
I am in the service part of the Mac industry so I see many other users and what their habits are in relation to using iTunes. My conclusion, there are many people that still fiddle with their iPhone while it is syncing. Best to leave it alone. Many that also fiddle with iTunes or actually go into the music library folder and screw with that, no knowing what they are doing.
I would venture to guess that most of us on this comment thread are reasonably advanced users of Apple hardware/software, and know never to mess with ANYTHING when it is syncing. Another poster hit on it here. iTunes either has a piss poor file system and/or has a very poor ability to handle corrupted files/apps, and provides the user very little in the way of diagnostic tools to solve the friggin’ “Other Category” problem. That is, other than a nuclear factory reset and restore from backup.
From your mouth to Cook’s ear! Apple has ignored iTunes for too long.
The problems with USB sync started when Apple made iOS devices autonomous – able to function without an iTunes equipped computer and has been getting progressively worse. The inability to easily set up an iPad or iPhone with the content you want and nothing else without a bunch of bullshit is probably my biggest frustration with the Apple media ecosystem.
I should be able to drag and drop a couple of movies onto my iPad without the damned thing trying to resync the entire device and ignoring device settings like manual management of videos.
Another common problem is having iTunes try to restore deleted media files even when you have no backed up version in local storage and have selected to manually manage media content.
The problem is that Apple NEVER made iOS devices autonomous nor have they made that claim. They just cleverly neglected to apprize consumers of their misapprehension. You still need to tether in your iOS device to load any video files not purchased from iTunes, do anything with audiobooks other than purchased them or change the bit rate of music files so they will fit on the device.
Ask any senior adviser at Apple tech support if iOS devices are standalone devices and the answer will be no.
Not directly related but I was surprised that upgrading to Yosemite lost my WiFi set up details. I was suddenly faced with a manual set up which I haven’t done in about 6 years since getting the service originally with various devices and OS upgrades never having this problem and was concerned I wouldn’t remember the details. Finding odd things like this happening which I only associate with PCs. A little concerning.
It’s a depressing thought, but Apple today is reminding me a bit too much of what Apple was like in the Amelio days. Except back then the software was pretty brilliant but the hardware was dreck. Today, the hardware seems close to SOTA, but the software is dreck. iTunes, sync, cloud apps, wireless networking and even simple things like wake-from-sleep are spotty at best and unworkable in many cases. Then there’s the whole issue with the new sandboxing/permissions environment that makes automator actions, scripts and user agents fail randomly where once they workdd reliacly. Or applications asking for network permission EVERY time they launch despite being whitelisted in security prefs. I mean, it’s really bad, a lot. This from someone who has used macs almost exclusively since 1987.
One of these days, I need to sit down and “regroup” all the various iTunes Libraries created with various OSX updates.
Ahhh, workaround genius. Realized just works is just old and no longer true. Many posts here have good advice how to make Apple work with alternative strategies. Wish someone would write a book. 🙂