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For me what happened was it stopped on waiting (step 6) and i waited like 10 min. finally thought it froze during sync, so I canceled it. My phone for some reason still acted like it was syncing even after it was unplugged. Once I plugged it back in I then had 22gb of other data and nothing else. I restarted my phone, and resynced it only once it got to the waiting step I left and did some other things for 15-20 min. I came back to it syncing ALL of my music once again.

after which everything worked great!

After the first initial sync have you updated it since by adding music or videos or whatever? Because I sometimes have success the first time but when I want to add new songs and manually manage it it starts deleting or un syncing the songs and getting stuck
 
After the first initial sync have you updated it since by adding music or videos or whatever? Because I sometimes have success the first time but when I want to add new songs and manually manage it it starts deleting or un syncing the songs and getting stuck

yes,

also not sure if this made a difference but I found somewhere that someone had both auto and manual music ticked (not sure what they are normally called)
I did do this as well...
 
Uncheck all the items you are syncing, click "Apply" besides the bar showing the storage usage, re-check items, click "Apply" and then sync. That did the trick for me.
 
My issue is only with my iPhone and only when I try to sync a purchased song. My ripped MP3s sync perfectly. And purchased or ripped songs also sync fine to my iPad. Same computer, same iTunes library, both with iOS7 and iTunes 11.1. The iPhone is a 5, and the iPad a 4.

My method is to use a playlist, and sync only that single playlist to the iPhone (I have a separate larger playlist for the iPad).

Whenever I add even 1 purchased song to the iPhone playlist, the sync process gets stuck at the "Waiting for changes..." step. If I remove that song, the sync runs perfectly.
 
after a full restore last night, without restoring from a backup, 'im stuck at waiting for items to copy AGAIN.

this is the most frustrating thing in the world. after the restore everything sync'd fine - 7900 songs. i went to add one album tonight and lo and behold it got stuck again. really frustrated at apple right now. what really makes me mad is that when i had an ipod 2nd gen or ipod video, there was never the slightest hint of a problem syncing, then itunes became a bloated mess that it is now and syncing works maybe 1/3 of the time.
/rant.

edit: just after hitting submit it left the waiting to copy screen..
 
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Uncheck all the items you are syncing, click "Apply" besides the bar showing the storage usage, re-check items, click "Apply" and then sync. That did the trick for me.

Didn't work for me. I'm having the same problem! it gave me 13 gb of other data when i tried to cancel my sync after being in it for 30 mins... ughhhhh
 
Didn't work for me. I'm having the same problem! it gave me 13 gb of other data when i tried to cancel my sync after being in it for 30 mins... ughhhhh

Have you rebooted your phone. The ios 7 upgrade really seems to need a "home + power"-boot to work properly...
 
Zipa : Uncheck all the items you are syncing, click "Apply" besides the bar showing the storage usage, re-check items, click "Apply" and then sync. That did the trick for me.

Zipa : Have you rebooted your phone. The ios 7 upgrade really seems to need a "home + power"-boot to work properly...

This finally worked (with my iPod Touch). Thanks :)
Syncing started after ± 5 minutes. No need for checking items seperately.
 
I got mine working... I noticed under the device summary tab under options the box that says "Manually manage music andd videos" was unchecked. I was positive it was checked prior to the upgrade. Checked it and hit sync and all my music is back on my iphone
 

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This is by far the most frustrating experience I have ever had with Apple software, beating out by a wide margin the hours I spent trying to get iTunes HD video playing acceptably on my brother-in-law's Windows laptop.

I have spent an exorbitant amount of time since I updated trying to get my music back on my iPhone - I wait until the "... waiting for changes ..." message to complete, it appears to sync, but the number of songs actually sync'ed is about half that should be. Looking under the Music tab of the iPhone entry in the sidebar, I see what's in the attached screenshot.

Everything else about the iOS 7 update has worked flawlessly, but this is enough to negate almost all the rest of the good impression.

Trying now with the "Manually manage" checkbox checked. I'll report back.
 

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I got mine working... I noticed under the device summary tab under options the box that says "Manually manage music andd videos" was unchecked. I was positive it was checked prior to the upgrade. Checked it and hit sync and all my music is back on my iphone

This does not work for me - I had previously tried
 
I think I got mine to work, and here's what I did:

I selected that I would choose what I wanted on my iPhone manually. I selected nothing. I hit "Apply."

The thing just sat at step 4 forever. So I left the phone plugged in, closed my laptop (MBA) and went to sleep.

I woke up the next day, opened my laptop and saw that it was still stuck. I hit the "x" by the text stating that I was on step 4 (top, middle in iTunes). I think selected to sync all music and files (NOT manually). I hit "Apply," and it worked.

I have no idea what I did.
 
I had exactly the same issue on my 5th gen iPod Touch, the only thing that sorted it out for me was downgrading to iOS 6.1.3. Everything is syncing as it should now, even when using iTunes 11.1 to do it.

All in all I ended up wasting two days trying to fix it. It all started for me when I upgraded to 7.0, suddenly I noticed that I could no longer sync new music to my touch, I would have the spinning circle icon and the songs would be greyed out on the iPod itself. I tried on two different PCs, both with iTunes 11.1 installed but neither would sync.

So I decided to do a clean install of iOS 7 hoping that would fix the issue. I spent almost 2 hours syncing my music and to make things worse, had iTunes messages every now again saying "This track could not be synced. The file format is not valid" - even though the tracks were either MP3 files or iTunes purchased music. Simply dragging them onto the iPod again worked which I found really bizarre. (Potential iTunes 11.1 issue?) Then I went to play a song and found that none of the tracks were playing, the sync had completely failed. I watched my iPod skip past every single song.

So again, another restore on another PC. this time I went into DFU mode to do it but exactly the same problem, now with the first issue re-occuring once again of not being able to sync.

Ended up thinking iOS 7 was not worth the hassle and downgraded to 6.1.3 and guess what, no issues. Everything has synced perfectly, no skipping tracks on the iPod.
 
I've been able to sync and get all my music onto my 5s, but for some reason I've lost all the album artwork when viewing my music under the "Artists" selection. The album artwork is there when I click on an artist and such....but just not showing under the "Artists" tab. Very weird.

Anyone else have this issue or know of a fix?
 
Any of you with these issues should definitely contact Apple at 1-800-APL-CARE. Describe your issue and say you want to speak with a senior advisor if they can't help you fix it. Be polite and just describe the exact problem in detail. That way Engineering can get this bug fixed. Or go to Apple.com/feedback and report in detail.

That said:

Have you rebooted your phone. The ios 7 upgrade really seems to need a "home + power"-boot to work properly...

Zipa's correct unfortunately. Apple's undoubtedly using its own CoreData migration APIs during updates. But if you have any database corruption this could prevent a proper update. Many people's updates go smoothly. But maybe one time you unplugged your phone from your computer during a sync operation and corrupted a database somewhere inside it. Or maybe your iTunes Library itself has become corrupt somehow.

Before re-initializing your device I'd recommend starting up your Mac or PC in recovery mode and running a full scan and repair of your system drive and any volumes containing music or other files in or referenced by your iTunes Library and iTunes syncing configuration.

If that doesn't solve it, then I hope you backed up your iPhone fully right before this update. If not, do so. Note the time of this latest backup so you can select it later in case you create more. Once your phone is backed up, put it in DFU mode and "restore" it to the latest version of iOS (this wipes your device). Then restore your old backup and sync in iTunes. If that fails again, wipe it again and try syncing just to the iTunes Library. If it works then your backup is messed up somehow, but if it also fails the problem is your iTunes Library.

Tell me the results. I think personally that some people's iTunes libraries are corrupt at some level. It may help to backup your existing library file and then make a fresh iTunes library ... though this seems draconian and could take a long time depending on the Library and what's in it, and your ratings, play lists, and play counts would get lost :/ This is why I suggest calling Apple.
 
I got mine working... I noticed under the device summary tab under options the box that says "Manually manage music andd videos" was unchecked. I was positive it was checked prior to the upgrade. Checked it and hit sync and all my music is back on my iphone

That fixed mine. Thanks.
 
Playlist Issues

I'm having problems with being able to save and make playlists on my computer and syncing them to my phone. This music feature is a disaster for those of us that like music. I've tried everything listed on here. I can get my music to sync but i can't get my saved playlists to sync. All that comes up are genius playlists which I prefer not to use. Has anyone found a solution to the playlist issue?
 
Finally fixed mine!

This has been driving me freakin insane for the past month with my iPad, yet everything works fine on my 4s. Thought I had tried everything - until now.

I just tried dragging one song onto my iPad as suggested by some - no luck. Then tried a whole album that wasn't on my iPad, and it did the normal thing where it looked like it wouldn't actually transfer the songs, then all of a sudden it decided to start transferring the other 800 odd songs it didn't have on it! Try that people, hope it helps!
 
Having the same issue with my iPhone 5S + iTunes on Mavericks. Nothing worked so far.
 
Just coming back to this thread as I had the same problem again, this time with iOS 7.1. It's the most frustrating thing having to restore and manually resync over 7,000 songs.

I've finally come to the conclusion that its an iTunes issue as I had this problem once with iOS 6. I've since changed to MediaMonkey to manage my iPod touch and so far, it hasn't let me down. Music is syncing as it should, when I want it to. If I only want to add one or two songs, I just drag them from the library in MediaMonkey to the iPod and its transferred in about 2 seconds.
 
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