Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

stiligFox

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 24, 2009
1,566
1,648
10.0.1.3
I'm having a real fit trying to sync my iPods and iPads in Catalina. How Apple completely bungled something so simple really baffles me. I'd use the Feedback assistant to report the problems I'm having, but the Feedback Assistant causes my Mac to force reboot, so it seems they aren't having any of that.

In no particular order:
- The storage bar now shows the current amount of storage available, not how much *will* be available when selecting media; this is useless because I have no idea whether the device will be over full or not.
- There is no progress bar besides a tiny pie wheel on the sidebar. No idea if it's backing up, syncing songs, downloading firmware. There is absolutely no visual guide to what is happening.
- Podcast album artwork doesn't show up on any device, wether my old iPods or my new iPad. It seems that Podcasts the app no longer keeps the album artwork tied as meta data to the podcasts themselves, so it doesn't get synced over. This is truly bizarre.
- My iPod nano (7th gen) had to be reset in order to sync it the first time with Catalina. It assumed that it was being synced to a new library. That's fine: transitional pains, and I can live with it. But the kicker is that it's doing it again. Every so often I sync my iPod and it requires that I remove all of my synced music and I have to pick all the songs I had on it from scratch, requiring hours of work.
- Syncing unreliably. Trying to sync music and podcasts is iffy at best. I've told my iPod to sync all of selected podcasts, and yet it only did some of them, and actually removed the other from the iPod that were already there. Sometimes when syncing, one of the podcasts will simply disappear from the list: For instance. Say I've selected "Evan and Katlyn" to be synced. It will begin the syncing process, and suddenly "Evan and Katlyn" will disappear from the Finder syncing window as an option as if it's no longer a podcast on my computer. Only killing and restarting Finder seems to fix this, but it just happens again right away. It does actually get synced to the iPod though, so that's a partial success, but still. A huge bug.
- Cannot apply changes half of the time. I find the "Apply" or "Sync" buttons are greyed out half the time for no good reason; I can make changes but have no way of applying them if the device is mid-sync. This is also particularly frustrating.

This might all sound like user error, but I've been using iPods and syncing them since Mac OS X Tiger. This is a horrifically implemented user experience, and I've seen no improvements so far. How can Apple mess something up so badly when it should've been a relatively easy job of porting over features and functions from the old iTunes? I love syncing devices in Finder - it makes way more sense to me there, but this whole thing makes me want to go back to Mojave.

And for what it's worth, my mother is having the same exact problems on her 2018 Mac mini running Catalina and using her iPad mini. It's frustrating the heck out of us both!
 
To add to this, here are issues I’ve had:

- I have off and on success with getting downloaded podcast episodes no longer in the current RSS feed to sync and stay on my iPhone. With the latest updates I can generally get them to sync if I plug in my phone (rather than doing it over WiFi), but at some point (I think when the Podcast app on the phone checks for new episodes), the downloaded episodes disappear. This actually has happened while I’m listening to such an episode - the episode finishes playing, but the info disappears from the screen (it shows the next podcast in the playlist holding at 0:00). So I don’t think it’s deleting the files, just losing track of them.

- When I’ve done repeated syncs on the computer to try to solve this (generally trying to use the ‘10 least recent unplayed‘ setting for the relevant podcasts), sometimes multiple copies of each episode will appear in the sync info window.

- For a long time I have used a smart playlist of the least recent unplayed episodes (limited to a total of 500) to determine what to sync to my iPhone. This got converted to a station, but is essentially frozen in time - podcasts aren’t being dropped from it as I play them.

All in all it’s been pretty hostile to people like me who are a couple of years behind in catching up on podcasts like WTF and CBC Ideas that only keep x number of the most recent podcasts in their feeds. If i wanted to be cynical it could be because podcasters and their advertisers want people to listen to the most recent episodes as it’s those listens that generate revenue, so my use case is not of interest to them.
 
Install only iTunes Access without disabling SIP, as described in post #14

I did this and got it installed, but alas it makes no difference to the bugs I have. I can’t even tell if it’s running - no ITunes Access processes are running in Activity Monitor. Do I need to manually load it or anything?

Thank you for the help. Really wish Apple would fix this...
[automerge]1574032617[/automerge]
To add to this, here are issues I’ve had:

- I have off and on success with getting downloaded podcast episodes no longer in the current RSS feed to sync and stay on my iPhone. With the latest updates I can generally get them to sync if I plug in my phone (rather than doing it over WiFi), but at some point (I think when the Podcast app on the phone checks for new episodes), the downloaded episodes disappear. This actually has happened while I’m listening to such an episode - the episode finishes playing, but the info disappears from the screen (it shows the next podcast in the playlist holding at 0:00). So I don’t think it’s deleting the files, just losing track of them.

- When I’ve done repeated syncs on the computer to try to solve this (generally trying to use the ‘10 least recent unplayed‘ setting for the relevant podcasts), sometimes multiple copies of each episode will appear in the sync info window.

- For a long time I have used a smart playlist of the least recent unplayed episodes (limited to a total of 500) to determine what to sync to my iPhone. This got converted to a station, but is essentially frozen in time - podcasts aren’t being dropped from it as I play them.

All in all it’s been pretty hostile to people like me who are a couple of years behind in catching up on podcasts like WTF and CBC Ideas that only keep x number of the most recent podcasts in their feeds. If i wanted to be cynical it could be because podcasters and their advertisers want people to listen to the most recent episodes as it’s those listens that generate revenue, so my use case is not of interest to them.

I bet you’re right!

I’m having the same issue on my iPad, it’s infuriating as after I sync it over the cable, as soon as my iPad connects to WiFi suddenly all of the podcasts are double listed (synced from iTunes and available from Apple all together in the same list.)

No idea how this got past QA especially when the system has been working fine in iTunes for years. If they really wanted us to stop doing podcasts this way, why leave in a buggy mess and a bad user experience? Why not just remove hardline syncing altogether?
 
I can’t even tell if it’s running - no ITunes Access processes are running in Activity Monitor. Do I need to manually load it or anything?

I'm sorry it hasn't helped. It should show up in System information - Frameworks

itunesAccess.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: stiligFox
I'm sorry it hasn't helped. It should show up in System information - Frameworks

View attachment 877890

thanks! It does show up but doesn’t fix the main issues that I’m having it seems. I’ll keep any eye on it - if it’ll at least keep me from having to reset all the music on my iPod once a week I’ll be happier!
 
Having precisely all the same issues with my iPad and my iPhone 11. It’s just absurd that this OS shipped like this. I have no interest in iCloud music library, why can’t we just keep sync working like it always has.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.