Help to Remove Ghost Audiobooks in Finder iPhone Sync

Unfortunately, the Apple Support representative I spoke this second time was unable to help me with the issue. He indicated he had never seen the problem before, and none of the support information he had access to addressed the issue. He also said he was unable to escalate the issue to a senior technician because I was not running macOS 26 Tahoe, and that since I was using a "vintage computer that could not run Tahoe" there was nothing further he could do. Has anyone else had this problem? (I thought Apple policy was to support the current version of macOS (26 Tahoe) and the two previous versions (15 Sequoia, 14 Sonoma)? Have I misunderstood something?)

In the meantime I have continued trying to figure this out myself. I have made the following discoveries.

• Finder is correctly seeing and syncing the four audiobooks I do have in the Books app. Those four books appear in amongst the list of "ghosted" audiobooks on the Audiobooks tab in Finder, and manipulating the checkboxes next to them will correctly add or remove them from my phone when I sync.
• The "ghosted" or "stuck" audiobooks that appear in the list of audiobooks on the Audiobooks tab of Finder that do not exist in the Books app will sync to my phone if they still exist in the expected, old location. This is to say, if the "ghosted" audiobooks still live in the expected directory with the same file name, then they will sync to my phone depending on whether or not the checkboxes are set. If a "ghosted" audiobook no longer exists, then it will show up in the list of sync errors that states, "Some items, including [...] were not copied to the iPhone because they could not be found."
• All of these "ghosted" or "stuck" audiobooks date back to when I was on an old version of macOS that still used iTunes. In fact, my old iTunes library still exists in my home directory under ~/Music/iTunes. If I examine the file "iTunes Music Library.xml" at that location, I can find all of the "ghosted" audiobooks in it. However, editing, renaming, or deleting that file doesn't have any impact on the problem. It is as if all of those audiobooks and associated metadata were read from that iTunes XML file when my system was upgraded to a version of macOS with Books instead of iTunes, and were written to some other location where it is now causing Finder to think they are still valid audiobooks.

So again, it is as if the information for these old audiobooks exists in an xml or plist file that Finder is parsing, which is causing the old audiobooks to get incorrectly listed on the Audiobooks tab when syncing. If I could just find the location of this file and either edit it or delete it, I'm sure it would resolve the problem.

To that end I've run the find command in Terminal against ~/Library and piped the results through grep for the title of one of the known "ghosted" files, and it didn't find anything applicable. I'm running it now against the entirety of my home directory so see if that finds anything:

find ~ -type f -exec grep -l "In The Town Of Tucumcari" {} \; 2>/dev/null

If that doesn't work, I'll try my entire hard drive, which will probably take days. I should also note that I've Googled this issue extensively and found many other threads on Stack Exchange and Reddit about this exact same problem, all from within the past five years, and none with a solution or workaround. It seems this bug has existed for several years and through many versions of macOS, and nobody has yet found a solution.

I called Apple Support on Friday, 10/18/25, and got though to a support professional after a very short wait. It's been a very long time since I actually called them and I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that Apple no longer charges for software technical support. You only need warranty or AppleCare for hardware support.

Unfortunately, the support professional was reluctant to provide me with support because I'm still using macOS 13 Ventura. He politely reminded me of Apple's "current and two previous" OS version support policy, which means I really need to be on macOS 14 Sonoma or later in order for him to be able to assist me with what he called "compatibility issues" between an iMac and an iPhone.

I was in the process of trying to persuade him that this wasn't a compatibility issue so much as it was a "bug" of sorts in the app on the iMac, something that was likely related to a stale cache, or a configuration file, and we likely only needed to examine the mechanism by which Finder determines what objects are available to sync in the other apps. I also mentioned that the root cause of the issue was very likely buried somewhere in my user profile, in a file somewhere in my home directory because this "bug" first happened to me years ago on macOS 10.15 Catalina, and came along to macOS 13 Ventura when I used Time Machine to recover my personal account and files to this current iMac, back when it was new and running macOS 13. At that point in the call the connection became garbled and eventually dropped. The support tech never called me back, and I figured that rather than try to persuade another support technician(s) to help me on an unsupported version of the OS, I'd look into upgrading. So that's what I'm looking into this weekend.

It looks like the latest version I can upgrade to is macOS 15 "Sequoia". That'll get me to a supported OS, but after doing an inventory today I learned that while 26 of the 43 desktop applications I regularly use are supported under macOS 15, 10 of my applications are not supported and will not run (i.e., will cease to function), and another 7 may or may not work, YMMV. (This is why I almost never upgrade.)

While I work on getting my system upgraded in preparation for another call to Apple Support, I'd love to hear if any other users are seeing the problem on a version of macOS newere than 13 Ventura. @imanzenero, what version are you using?

Hi picas, thank you for the suggestion.

Unfortunately, no, the audiobooks have all been removed from my iPhone as well. By "un-synced", I mean that I cleared the checkbox labeled Sync audiobooks onto iPhone. This causes a prompt that says (paraphrased), "All audiobooks will be removed from your iPhone". So, all audiobooks have been removed from both my iMac and my iPhone. Erasing my iPhone won't help because Finder is showing audiobooks it thinks are on my iMac, to be synced to my iPhone. In this case, there are no audiobooks on my iMac--but Finder still thinks there are, and is trying to sync non-existant audiobooks to my iPhone.

Hence my comment about something being cached somewhere: My iMac thinks there are local audiobooks, and there aren't.

Well, I've made no progress on this problem, in spite of spending several hours doing Google searches and reading threads on Reddit in Apple support forums. I have noticed this problem isn't just affecting Audiobook syncing, it's also affecting Photos syncing. More specifically, when syncing my iPhone in finder, the Photos tab doesn't refresh itself with an updated (current) list of available albums and events from within Photos. For example, in Finder, with my iPhone selected, on the Photos tab, I select the option to Sync: Selected albums. In the displayed list of available albums, I can see the album entitled "Albums for Jeff's iPhone", and it lists five sub-albums.

However, this doesn't accurately reflect what's in Photos. When I select the same album in Photos, I see seven sub-albums.

No amount of fiddling (e.g., selecting, de-selecting, creating new, deleting old, etc.) in Photos or Finder will cause the Finder window to update to correctly display the missing albums in Photos, nor the correct list of audiobooks in Books.

Specifically, this is the same problem as with Audiobooks: Finder isn't refreshing itself with the latest available information from the Photos.app or the Books.app. To be honest, this may be affecting my music library too, but I don't know because under the Music tab I have selected Sync: Entire music library.

I guess I'll have to call Apple with a credit card and see if they can help me fix this.

Latest news on this...

Last night I completed an upgrade from 13.6.6 "Ventura" to 15.7.1 "Sequoia". The upgrade went smoothly (all things considered), but the upgrade had no impact on this issue. When attempting to sync my phone though Finder, the Photos and Audiobooks tabs do not accurately reflect the available content in my Photos or Audiobooks app libraries.

However, since I am now on a supported version of macOS, hopefully Apple Support will be able to assist me in resolving this issue. I'll call them as soon as time permits, and post the results here.

An ah-ha moment!

It turns out the list of available albums in Photos displayed in Finder on my iMac is actually correct. The reason the albums are not displayed on the Photos tab in finder is that they are smart albums and they had zero photos in them! The query to populate the albums had a date constraint, and since no photos met that constraint, the album was not populated.

It appears the Finder doesn't include Photos albums for syncing if the albums have no photos in them. I guess that kind of makes sense.

imanzanero,

Can you please elaborate on step #3 of your procedure, specifically: where you say "I was able to delete the Audiobooks I didn't want from the Sync list in Finder", how, exactly, did you delete them?

Whether or not a Sync is in progress, when I select Audiobooks I don't want, I am not able to delete them. With a book selected (in the screenshot below, "The Amazing Spiderman Vol. II"), neither of the delete keys on keyboard have any effect. Right-clicking does not display a context pop-up menu, and I cannot drag items from the list to the trash. The missing audiobooks do not exist on my iPhone, or in the Audiobooks app.

Just a bump... seriously nobody has anything to contribute here? Any word on how 26.0.1 impacts this?