Why won't my iPod connect to Mac after macOS Sequoia update?

Having the same problem as everyone else, figured I'd give an update re: what the situation is now that I've updated to Sequoia 15.5.

It seems to have helped; it's now recognizing that there's an iPod attached, the name of it, how much memory it has, etc; I can also look at the folders (including hidden folders with all the music in them).

However, the "sync" management page says it cannot find the device, so I can't add music.

This is an issue for me. I have tried updating both an ipod classic and an ipod shuffle and am unable to add music to these devices anymore, even ejecting the ipod classic once I have tried updating does not work. I have to shut down my computer to disconnect the ipod. I thought maybe it was an issue with the ipod classic but having tried with another device and seen the reports here, it seems it is an issue with macOS.

Sequoia 15.3 worked OK with my 2nd generation Nano.

Out of luck with 15.4

It can be done. Start the restore process. When it looks like the iPod has given up restart your Mac with the iPod still plugged in. After restart do not unmount the iPod disk on the desktop. Open the Music.app and you should be right to go. Uncheck the "Enable Disk Use" & "Manually manage ..." It probably won't make any difference the iPod disk will still mount but yer whatever.

Additional note: managed to get to the "restore iPod" screen by erasing the disk in Disk Utility, but it never finished the process, and the device manager gets stuck and I have to manually go into Activity Monitor to quit. I'm giving up until the next OS update. Hopefully I didn't completely break the iPod so when this is fixed I can use it again, haha.

Frank It can be done. Start the restore process. When it looks like the iPod has given up restart your Mac with the iPod still plugged in. After restart do not unmount the iPod disk on the desktop. Open the Music.app and you should be right to go. Uncheck the "Enable Disk Use" & "Manually manage ..." It probably won't make any difference the iPod disk will still mount but yer whatever.

For what it's worth - and I recognize this isn't viable for everyone - I found a foolproof workaround and have tested it on a handful of iPods: An older Mac.

At this point in time, you can get an 11" MacBook Air or 2014 or older Mac Mini for under $100 pretty easily, and apart from being potentially limited in internal storage, any machine like that - basically running older Mac OS of Catalina or earlier - will reliably maintain any iPod and iTunes Library. They run "actual iTunes" and essentially work entirely as originally designed. They won't work with newer iPhone, as far as I can tell, but my High Sierra Mac Mini connects smoothly with any iPod I can throw at it.

This is kind of a classic tech conundrum and you'll see a lot of greybeard IT guys and various kinds of organizations do it this way: keep on hand one or two machines of certain vintages to perform maintenance tasks on other devices that have been dropped by newer OSes or other software. I also keep Windows 10 and Windows XP laptops on a shelf for the blue moons when those are needed for something like decrypting an old CD. The older Macs can open things like Aperture libraries and even recover files from old versions of iMovie.

Add me to the list. I'm running Sequoia 15.5 and just plugged in my iPod Photo. I use it in my garage every day. I just ran all my music through a volume normalization process and now want to replace the music on my iPod with the newly normalized music.

I plugged it into the USB port on my MBP M1 and both Finder and Apple Music see it but refuse to connect giving me the error msg..."The selected device could not be found", both in Finder and Apple Music...which is bogus because it was in fact found. I can see the four folders, (Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Photos), because I enabled Disk Mode years ago. I see both entries in Finder.

Disk Utility sees it and it passes First Aid. I really don't want to wipe the drive at this point for fear it will make the iPad a paper weight. I've read through all the posts here but none helped.

Yes it needs a new battery, I'm on my second one but it didn't last very long, I just leave it plugged into power in the garage, it's been very reliable.

Any other suggestions aside from waiting for Apple to find the issue in Sequoia and fix it?

FYI.. .. Also wanted to say that once I saw its disk show up in Finder, I was successfully able to drag and drop a music file onto it, then select that file, hit the Space bar and played it. I really need to have it show up in Apple Music so I can replace all the songs

Same problem with iPod classic and Sequoia 15.4 on my iMac 2020 no longer working. Worse, I clicked Sync and all the music on my iPod was instantly erased.

I have the same problem with an iPod nano 3rd gen and an iPod nano 7th gen.

Finder will show the iPod but won't sync but tells me to restore to factory settings. Once started to restore the grey loading bar won't disappear. Cancelling the loading screen makes it show "Software : loading ... " . Nothing seems to happen. Everything unresponsive.

macOS 15.4 just shipped. Update. See if it fixes the problem. No guarantees. But every update includes bug fixes as well as security fixes and sometimes new features.

Do try the full restore process as others have had success. Good luck!