Apple Devices on Windows 10 crashes while Syncing Music on to iPhone

I am having the same issue. I've been working successfully with Apple Music as a replacement for iTunes since the announcement several months ago that iTunes for Windows was going away. Up until several days ago, one of the things that I appreciated about Apple Music for Windows 10 was that syncing music to my iPhone/iPod was completely problem free, which was a huge improvement over iTunes, which would on random occasions get stuck mid-sync.

I have been trying for 2 days to sync about 30 GB of audio from my Apple Music Library on my Windows PC. Sometimes I get 10% of the way through, one time I got to about 80% complete, but have not been able to successfully complete my sync without Apple Devices shutting down.

I have reset the Apple Devices app on my PC. I have verified my cable and my ports. Short of wiping and reinstalling everything I'm at a loss as to how to fix this.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Just a quick update on my end; I have slowly and painfully chipped away at my 18,300 songs, and am currently at about 2200 left to go. I had a day where I was doing a lot of relatively mindless tasks at my desk, so I called in a support case while I was repetitively launching sync attempts, and have progressed on the case to where I will be speaking with an engineer tomorrow as the support manager saw what was happening and escalated it accordingly.

It was literally dozens of sync attempts yesterday, with my best/most productive getting something like 1150 songs synced, and the mean was around 200 songs at a time. You can do the math, I'm just tired of it. :-s

Basically, it seems to time out/reach some sort of data transfer limit and just completely hiccups out of the application. No error message, no status code, and Apple Devices is no longer visible or traceable on my PC.

Anyway, if any random Apple engineers are checking in on this, it is not a setup issue, it is not a network issue, it is a bug. You should probably try to fix it. (And thanks to the support staff who moved my request fairly painlessly and quickly through their requisite layers of checks and balances.)

I am having same issue since installing "Apple Devices" which I really don't like at the moment. It TRIES to act like iTunes (never had a single issue using iTunes until Apple decided they don't want to support it anymore), but just doesn't cut it!!! I'm so sick of added "features" and other patches and upgrades. When I installed "Apple Devices" on my Windows 10 PC and then connected my iphone to the PC, it stated that I needed to upgrade my iOS to 17.4.1 (which I already had installed/upgraded previously) and I have been unable to synch my music playlist. I recently purchased an album and want to synch it to my phone for Apple Music (which I also am not pleased with - unable to browse artists/albums by starting to type their names and it usually jumps to that section - say I wanted to listen to The Police - I was able to select artists in iTunes, start typing "poli..." and it would jump to The Police.) Now I have to scroll all the way down either using my mousewheel, or the slider bars - and I have a LOT of music with band names that start way before the "P's". An annoyance, but overlookable.

What really steams my beans, is that I purchased an album specifically to put in "Apple Music" so I could listen to it in my car. NOT!!!! I think I will invest in something other than apple - MusicBee(?)

I am having the same problem with Apple Devices not identifying the actual IOS on my iPhone (like poster Cfoster 3448 Apple Devices tells me I need to update to 17.4.1 when my phone says that's what it is running).

I was finally able to successfully sync a playlist to both my iPhone and my iPod Touch by paring the playlist down to about 10GB of audio. I should be thankful...at least now Apple Devices finishes the job it starts.

It is evident over the course of the last few weeks that Apple is, in its own way, trying to tweak Apple Music for Windows to make it perform more like iTunes. For example, when I first converted over from iTunes, to import audio files into my library, I had to select each file for import; a few days ago I noticed that I now have the option to add a folder. That's an improvement - thank you. I also appreciate (and this is huge for me) the ability to stream lossless audio on my Windows PC from Apple Music that until recently I could only do on my Apple device.

A welcome improvement would be for Apple Music to include a function to play/extract audio from audio CDs. iTunes could do it; Apple Music cannot. Along with that is the iTunes ability to convert homemade audio files into AAC or ALAC has disappeared.

Another thing that iTunes did well that Apple Music does not at all is display libraries like spreadsheets. This made tag editing very easy, and also made it easy for a user to see if an error had been made in library management, because iTunes could display album and track counts in ways that Apple Music doesn't. In Apple Music, I have yet to find a way to see how many albums I have in my library. I know I can see how many albums are tagged with either the same genre or artist, but neither of those are practical options for the whole library (especially for us geezers who have large libraries).

Long story short, with iTunes, I had a tool that, for library management purposes, was nearly self-sufficient. Without iTunes I have to use three other applications to do efficiently .

[Edited by Moderator]

I was able to sync my whole library through restarting the sync 5-6 times (somewhat about 3k songs to sync).

It is extremely regrettable that Apple seems to have little interest in delivering at least usable software for Windows. In their current state, the new programs are worse than iTunes, which had a lot of room for improvement, especially in terms of UX.

Screw Apple Music/Devices/TV - they are shoddy at best as far as "working" properly and missing basic functions that iTunes had built-in from the beginning of iTunes. I really miss the "CoverFlow" view that they axed. Copyright blah blah... anyway, here is what I did to get iTunes back with all of my library, playlists, album artwork intact and functioning like the good-ol' iTunes we have grown to love(?).

1) created a restore point twice with two unique different names (probably not necessary - one is probably enough)

2) uninstalled Apple "Music", "Devices" (I didn't have TV installed)

3) rebooted/restarted Windows

4) **Not sure if this is necessary - but I did a Windows disk cleanup and rebooted again

5) Downloaded and installed the latest iTunes (version 12.13.2.3) (which is still available for download and was just updated today).

6) iTunes pulled all of my music/audio/album(s) tracks and playlists back in (including album art, mp3tags, etc.) and were available and working just like it did before Apple Music infected my system.

There was only one album that it couldn't find the tracks to, which was a recent purchase I made on Apple/iTunes store - easy fix, just selected "Locate tracks" when it couldn't find the first track of the album. Everything else was available and working properly. Haven't tried syncing my phone yet - that may be another dilemma to deal with. Wish me luck!

wbhern,

Thanks for taking the time and trouble to elevate this issue with Apple. It's really puzzling that the Apple Devices shutdown events are so (apparently) random ... there are rare occasions when I have no problems at all with either my phone or iPod; at other times the shutdown event happens near the beginning or middle or end of the sync.

Good luck & thanks again.

I have the same issue. However, when I put my Windows 10 and iPhone in flight mode during sync, it didn't crash. I guess it some internet communication going on during sync that makes the Apple Devices crash. Hope it helps.

I’m not sure, but based on the comments I’ve read on this board I think I’ve managed to solve my instance of this problem. I have around 14k songs in what used to be my iTunes library, and was having a problem whereby the Apple Devices app would crash when during a long sync. I was also finding that the app would insist that I needed to update my installation of iOS on my brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though the phone was reporting that as being the installed version.

So, after much trial and error I’ve got the problem resolved. I followed these steps:

1. Let Apple Devices download and install the latest version of iOS onto my phone. Although there was no need to do this, it appears to have reset the flag on the app and it’s no longer insisting on doing it;
2. Switched off the WiFi on my desktop PC (which is where Devices is installed) and made the LAN the only connection to both my router and my NAS box (which hosts both the library file and the audio library itself);
3. Put the iPhone into Flight Mode;

I then ran a test sync using a small number of playlists, which comprised about 1,000 songs. The sync process completed gracefully AND Devices didn’t crash at the end of it. I ran a number of other syncs until all of my playlists (regular AND smart) had been synced.

Once I’ve discharged my battery a decent amount, I’m going to go for a full library sync. I’ll report back afterwards.

I'm on Windows 11, but it's the same story. I have about 180GB of music (18,000+ songs), and going through them 330 at a time isn't acceptable. I bought a 1 TB iPhone for the express purpose of being able to house my music library -- this needs to go above "a bunch of users griping about it" to "here's the fix" tomorrow.

I continue to have issues with either my iPod Touch or my iPhone SE (right now Windows 10 likes my phone better than the iPod). The only way I have successfully completed a sync is to keep the size relatively small (6-10 GB of data) and be prepared to restart the sync process multiple times. Yesterday it took Apple Devices 4 attempts to complete syncing about 370 songs.

If this is happening with Windows 11 users as well (I had held out hope that it was just us 10 holdouts that were dealing with this problem), then Apple needs to own their products & services and make them work properly. For everyone that pays for them, not just Mac users.

Hello!

I tried to transfer around 2.7k songs in my library and Apple Music just doesn’t work. Always crashes at different moments.

To fix this I just downloaded an old version of iTunes (I think that is 12.13.2.3). You can find the file by just searching it in Google.

By using this version of iTunes, I finally managed to transfer all my music.

Syncing music to iPhone has always been a joke (missed songs, have to reset the sync 5 times for it to catch what it needs to sync) but now the crashing has made it even worse. I know Apple's market isn't People With Their Own Libraries but it'd be nice to know the thousands I spend can at least beget me a music app that actually works.

Your not alone I am having the same issue as well if It gets passed 250 songs or 1300 songs at crashes at anytime i reset my windows pc 2 times and I know it’s the app I even wiped my iPhone as well. I have raised the issue with apple support.