For anyone who is constantly experiencing Apple Devices shitware crashing on Windows 10 and 11 starting with an update around mid-2024, fear not. You are not alone. I think I found a workaround but it’s not 100%.
If you don’t know, Apple finally decided to break iTunes down into several different apps after finally getting that application’s act together. iTunes syncing capabilities got moved into this terrible software that likes to crash through a sync. And by “likes to crash”, I mean it crashes 100% of the time if you let Apple Devices manage copying data to the device.
I can count on one hand how many times an automatic sync has finished. Seriously.
My workaround is to manually move items onto the iPod. Found out this also combos with the option to convert down lossless items on the fly. I limit the sync to a few hundred songs at a time. It crashes still, but 20-30% of the time instead of 100%.
From what I can tell, the problem might be in AMPDevicesAgent, which is a daemon spawned by another process, also confusingly called AMPDevicesAgent.
As you can see, it’s doing all the processing, so whatever is causing the sync to abort is happening in this process most likely.
Apple, fix your fucking programs. It’s been months of this behavior with radio silence on your end. I know you treat Windows as a second class platform, but at least pretend to give a fuck. Apple Music is so obnoxiously slow, I can’t believe it made it out of any testing at all without anyone thinking “perhaps a ten second load time off an SSD on modern hardware in 2024 is too slow”. And, as I’ve elaborated, Apple Devices is total shit. How far the mark has fallen since Job’s death.
Oh, and as I was typing up that last cheeky remark, the damn shitware closed AGAIN. And I was able to confirm that AMPDevicesAgent disappears about a half a second before the Apple Devices daemon shuts down, and then the entire process disappears from the Task Manager. So the problem is in AMPDevicesAgent.
There, I did your job for you Apple. Do me a solid and fix it.