Problem: Apple Music Mac sync waits... forever. Solved!

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This had been bugging me for a year and I finally got music sync between my Mac and my iPhone working reliably in 2024... With a little 'dance' I have to do. Sadly.

I don't think I'm alone in having problems, either, judging from reports online, yet the issues are not so widespread that Apple has actually, you know, FIXED them with a software patch. Sigh.


The symptom is that, when plugging in to sync (I know, I know, old school), everything just grinds to a halt when it comes to the 'sync' step, i.e. where your music library syncs to what's on the phone. It will hang there forever.


What's happening, under the hood, is that Apple's MDCrashReportTool (ironically) has errr... crashed, and, when queried by Finder's Music sync, can't respond to say that all is OK. So the latter just waits and waits... 

The 'solution' (which works every time but is a bit of a hassle) is to go into Activity Monitor on your Mac (it's in the Utilities folder), find MDCrashReportTool and double click it.


Now Quit it or, more probably, Force Quit it. Et voila! Sync resumes and your music updates all transfer smoothly.

What a faff. Apple doesn't seem to care, sadly. I'll bet there are a few thousand people round the globe all suffering, mind you, so fixing this would at least be nice, Apple, and would save me half a dozen clicks every single blessed time I want to do a Music sync.

Just saying... Anyway, now you know the workaround, so at least you can get going again!

PS. If you like this feature and want to support my work then please do so here via PayPal. Thanks.

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