I've had a lot of issues with music sync on 4S, 5S and iPad 3 this week. It often gets stuck at 'waiting for items to copy' before it's even done anything, sometimes for 30 minutes or more. No changes have been made to the iTunes music at all on my MBP, and yet I've done the sync several times on each of those devices, and it seems random whether or not it's happy no tracks need to be copied to the device, or some major percentage of the music needs to be copied again.
Jul 17, 2011 - Never heard of 'em! Does that goddamn spinning beachball mean that my computer's. The initial backup will take awhile, so plug your Mac into the Time. It can be scheduled, or set to run when you plug in a specific external drive. Once DiskWarrior has finished building a preview directory, you'll get. Long-term Mac users can guess that macOS High Sierra (10.13) is a refinement of macOS Sierra (10.12) because of the naming structure. You should also have a bootable backup of your old system just in case.
And yesterday I went to play an album on my iPad and discovered four tracks were missing, even though a sync just beforehand thought no tracks needed copying, and they were there a few hours before, so the sync must have erroneously deleted them from the iPad. I'm going to try removing all music from each device by unselecting it in iTunes sync options. Then I'll reselect it and sync again to put it all back on, in case this makes a difference to getting it into a state where it all works properly. This is quite a big deal though. With 300GB of lossless music being converted to 50GB @ 256kbps, it takes hours. And I have three devices to do it on.
I was having the same syncing problem with my 4S, iTunes 11.1.2 and iOS 7.0.3. Time after time, it would hang up during the 'Finishing Sync' process.
No new music would be added, nor would playlists be updated. I went to the Music tab and unchecked 'Sync Music.' When I did, I got the warning asking me if I wanted all music to be removed from the device. I said yes and did another sync.
After doing so, it still was getting hung (although the sync button became active again), and there were still a couple of playlists and songs left on the device (as well as an audiobook). I went to the Books tab and unchecked 'Sync Audiobooks' and clicked 'Apply.' After the sync, once again it was hanging and the sync button became active. Here's what I think helped: On the iPhone, I deleted the remaining playlists and songs by swiping over them (just as you would delete an email).
From then on, when doing a sync, it didn't get hung anymore.Completed the sync process very quickly. I then re-checked 'Sync Music' and 'Sync Audiobooks' on their respective tabs and re-selected the playlists and music that I wanted to sync, and everything synched as normal.
All new music was added and playlists were updated upon re-uploading. Complete Restore After trying several reboots etc, I just went ahead and nuked my iPhone 5S and restored from iCloud. I was then able to sync music and photos.
Although time consuming i.e. Spending most of the evening on this mess, the phone did sync correctly. The phone also did sync this morning but seemed to hang a bit so the the basic problem is still there.
My two iPod Touches with iOS 6 had no problem. Yesterday while plugged into iTunes before the restore I looked at the iPhone music under the music tab and did find the music that I was attempting to sync over but it was 'greyed out'. At that point I thought that wiping the phone was the best course of action.