With iTunes 9, Apple Brings Back A Classic: The Slow iPhone Sync
One main culprit is what should be a nice, new feature in iTunes 9 called “Automatically fill free space with songs.” It does exactly what it says, finds songs to put on your iPhone to fill it up. This is great for people like me with too large of a music library to sync it all with the iPhone, and who don’t really use playlists (the main way to sync music to the iPhone). Unfortunately, if you click this “Automatically fill free space” option, it seems that sometimes it wants to remove and replace much of the random music. If you have a 32 GB iPhone, that is going to take a while.
So easy enough fix, right? Just don’t check that box. Well yes, except that regular syncing itself seems to take significantly longer with iTunes 9 as well. Previously, it would take me about a minute to sync my iPhone with iTunes 8. With iTunes 9, I’m seeing wait times of about 5 to 10 minutes. And sometimes the system just hangs, and you have to manually stop it.
This doesn’t appear to be the backing up process, which is still being done in just seconds, but is some other process involved in the syncing. The status indicator simply reads “Syncing iPhone” as the progress bar spins for minutes.
Hopefully, this is just a matter of another firmware update from Apple for the iPhone. You would have thought they would have checked the syncing speed on the just released iPhone 3.1 firmware, but apparently not. So now, if I want to sync just a couple of songs before leaving my desk, I have to wait 5 to 10 minutes. It’s like the original iPhone all over again.