Album art in Music for Catalina

THIS IS THE SOLUTION!

Apple is using a new library format ".musiclibrary", you can find it in the new Music folder named "Music Library.musiclibrary". You can ask it to rebuild the library by ,quit Music, after press option key + click to start without a library. Then select Choose Library and select from iTunes folder the file named "iTunes Library.itl". Then Music asks for a location to store the new library, which will be in Music/music. Then Music should start loading artworks (just allow some time depending on the size of library).

All the best!

Hope for better OS updates from apple next time!

I feel like apple start to go down...

Having already installed Catalina, Doug's Scripts did not work for me. Almost all my album art is from ripped CDs and radio broadcasts. So here's what I did:

I created a smart playlist: Album Artwork-> is false, as recommended above. I then selected all the tracks in that playlist and removed them from my Library. I then went to the Add to Library pulldown and selected my entire Music folder that I have stored on an external drive. It took a long time for the relevant files to be added, but when they did so they all showed the album art in the main window of the music app as well as for individual tracks.

I selected all the albums, then right clicked on any one and selected "download artwork" and all my artwork for the albums was recovered. Hope this helps

In the past, and recently with Catalina, when I select File > Library > Get album Artwork, after searching for the artwork, I get a message telling me artwork couldn’t be found for ‘x’ amount of albums and it lists them. You can save that list. Try selecting your entire library before Getting Artwork.

As a side note, when I upgraded to Catalina from Mojave, Music appears to be completely unaffected. It was only after a clean install that my Artwork wasn’t showing. Catalina didn’t strip it, it just doesn’t show it. It took me several hours, but I was able to restore my entire library using my method above. To get all the artwork to appear on my iPhone, I had to delete Music from the phone, reinstall it and do a backup, then a sync. It took about an hour, but now all artwork is showing on my phone as well.

I've found a solution for this issue. Apple is using a new library format ".musiclibrary", you can find it in the new Music folder named "Music Library.musiclibrary". This problem probably arises because Music ****** up when transferring the old music library to its secret new little library. You can ask it to rebuild the library by quit Music and option-click it to start without a library, then instruct it to load the old iTunes library under iTunes folder named "iTunes Library.itl". Then Music asks for a location to store the new library, which doesn't matter as you can move it later and Music recognizes it. Then Music should start loading artworks.

Hi all,

Good news!!!

There is a latest update for Catalina, still the same version. I can't tell it did the update after the update.

Anyway, it is about 900MB of update download. After the reboot, and the initial start up for Music app was slow (looks like it rebuild something) but then all the album artwork are there. And the Music app is fast and responsive.

I shut down the Music app and restart, all the album artwork are still there and the system run smoothly (mostly but not always compared with iTunes) again.

I believe Apple has fix the issue.

Please update your Catalina and let you know if you experience the fix.

Good luck all!!

After this last fail I deleted the newly created Music folder and Music Library file. Then as previously suggested I reopened Music while holding the "option" key and selected my former iTunes.itl library file so it could rebuild the Music library. This time it worked properly and all of my album art is now salvaged.

Anyway, no huge data losses or need to revert to older OS versions/app versions. All is good until next macOS update...

Nick Peck wrote:

I am in the UK: 0800 107 6285

USA is 800-275-2273

I haven't called yet - I need to brace myself!!

Good luck and look forward to feedback - I will also call them quite soon.

Stay safe!

I never did get around to calling Apple, as I fear getting through to the first level tech support people will be about as hopeless as banging by head against a cinder block; however, I did submit a bug report in Feedback Assistant over a month ago with (unsurprisingly) no reply thus far.

I also looked into Doug's AppleScripts (not sure if they were linked earlier in this thread, but they've come up in others on the same topic), and discovered the one that appears to be the cure to this frustrating issue. Doug has several scripts available, but the one that you want is Apply Embedded Artwork. This script will extract the existing embedded artwork and reapply it to the track in Music, which is what should have been done in the first place during the import process.

I have, however, encountered what may be a small bug in this script where it doesn't seem to work when selecting a single track or for the first of a group of selected tracks. I've reached out to Doug to see what's going on, and will share the results. If this is in fact a bug, hopefully he'll have an updated version out soon.

But in general, I believe the concept behind this script addresses exactly what the root cause of this issue is. Give it a try (noting the above limitation, for now...) and send a small donation Doug's way for doing the work that Apple refuses to do!

Not for .aiff files... the whole support for embedded artwork in .aiff's is broken in Catalina (Music app and Finder). I stubbornly stored all my lossless music in .aiff format for years but to alleviate this issue with the artwork I converted all to ALAC, which retains support for artwork. Shame that I had to migrate a huge chunk of my collection just to workaround an inexplicable bug like this!

To re-iterate... the whole support for embedded artwork in .aiff's is broken in Catalina (Music app and Finder). No DougScript will save the artwork in your embedded aiff files. In fact, adding new .aiff's into the Music application will *remove* the embedded artwork. Try it if you don't believe me. I suggest making ALAC copies of AIFF's.

Embedded artwork lives in the tag of a track along with details such as the name, album, artist, track no. etc. iTunes or the new Apple Music app can also fetch artwork from the iTunes Store. Tracks with embedded artwork should retain it when moved from one app to another or to a new computer. If the artwork isn't embedded then Music will likely need to try to locate the right image in the store. You can select albums without images, right-click and use Get Album Artwork from the context menu.

tt2

I have 110,000 songs in my Library. I saw the Adding Artwork notice in the menu bar and was skeptical. But then I looked at the MAC HD info and saw that it adding files to the drive - slowly. I have my library on an external drive and the database for Music is on the local drive. I have set my mac to stay awake so it continues to add and left Music open.

I believe if you do this, all cover art you added will eventually be added back. At the rate it is currently adding, it may take a week, but it should all come back. I think it is scanning every music file and adding the image to the data base, which with 110,000 songs, it will be a long process. I have a Mackbook Air, Mid 2013 for reference.

As suggested in my posts m method was using the Doug’s Scripts to embed the artwork in iTunes and then three transitions to Music where 2 of three attempts worked for all of my album art. It occurs to me now that the transition never worked when upgrading the macOS and Music all at once. Both times it worked for me I had deleted the Music created library and opened Music with the option key depressed. Then I pointed Music to my iTunes library where I had used Doug’s scripts to square away my artwork. This then recreated the Music library file, and I was sure to give it plenty of time to settle everything while creating my new library.

There are are still many bugs in macOS Catalina and Music though.., so I personally would not recommend making the transition yet.

You can find scripts for this task at Doug's AppleScripts. There are scripts for both iTunes and Music. Ideally this is a task that would have been done in iTunes before updating to Catalina. Once you're running Catalina you may find you have to manually fix any missing images that Music isn't able to fetch for you.

tt2

I think I found a solution .......

In Preferences - Files the location of my media pointed to My Music from iTunes, that was on my disc. Music was linked to those files. I double checked if there were no other references to the iTunes folders and there were not.

I deleted allllll my albums from Music, without deleting the song-files/mp3's/etc.

Then I pushed the 'Defaults' (in Dutch...) button and the Media folder changed from the iTunes location to the location in the Music folder ....

Then I went tot the iTunes Media folder in Finder and dragged allllllll my media to Music. I copied all the media WITH (most of the) album artwork!

After the I backupped the former folder and deleted them .... Everything works WITH album art now.