Album art in Music for Catalina

There's a tag editor in the App Store called Meta that makes managing your music collection much easier. My album art embedded in each track has stayed in place so far. I'm assuming everyone has updated to Catalina 10.15.

1. Move your music files somewhere safe if they're on your Mac in an iTunes/Music folder and not on an external drive/NAS
2. Delete all albums from Music and close it (don't delete the music files like I did 😬)
3. Go to your User Folder > Music and delete the second Music folder in there (which contains a Media folder and Library file)
4. If your music is stored externally, go there and delete the two "Automatically Add To. . ." folders and the hidden PLIST file (Shift + Command + . will show hidden files)
5. Add your albums back to Music using File > Add To Library and and the artwork should start to show on your Mac and iPhone when it re-syncs

The artist pictures will eventually show up too. Also seems to take a while before the artwork shows up in Get Info.

I'm not sure what part of this made things work correctly though. But just make sure you don't accidentally delete your music files. Run Time Machine first, put them on a flash drive, copy them to your downloads folder, etc.

I've noticed the same. The perpetual "Loading Artwork..." but I scan the album view and nothing is loading. I go to "Get Artwork" and nothing loads. And then when trying to quit the Music app, it slows and I have to force quit as it's sluggish.

I kind of anticipated an issue like this when they sunset the iTunes app and figured there may be some glitches for those of us with large libraries where we scanned in or added art that isn't part of the store.

Any fixes welcome.

Eek, that look like Music failed to import your iTunes library properly. Unfortunately I don't yet see an update to this document that deals with the same issue in Catalina If you don't see your entire library after you update iTunes on your Mac or PC - Apple Support, however it seems that you use the option to Switch libraries with the Music app or Apple TV app in macOS Catalina - Apple Support you should be able to open a selected iTunes library with the Music app and have it updated.

tt2

account12, I noticed this exact same behavior. I also use iTunes Match and have meticulously updated all the metadata and embedded artwork. All of my curated music has been in iTunes Match for a while and was working well so I removed local files on my Mac to free up space (I have a back up on my NAS).

Now with the Catalina update, all re-downloaded music is missing the embedded artwork. The Music App does show the artwork in the Get Info tab but you cannot see it in Finder. I also used AtomicParsley (a metadata command line utility) to extract the artwork from the file and it is indeed missing.

I noticed that if you have the files locally, and update the album artwork, it does properly embed the artwork in the file. But the initial download or any artwork edited without a local file will not include embedded artwork in subsequent downloads. That is a MAJOR problem for those of us that took months to get our large music collection curated and keep it in iTunes Match. That prevents that artwork from being available to other apps like Plex.

I spoke with several people on Apple Support and they say this is by design in the new Music App. I suggested that they "fix" this design and they asked me to submit a request on https://www.apple.com/feedback/. I would highly encourage anyone who spent a long time adding custom album artwork to use this link to request that Apple add a way to embed the album artwork into the file upon download.

Also, I saw a user report that they could not copy the album artwork from iTunes and another user reported they could drag and drop the artwork. What I have found is that you can only copy or drag the artwork if the artwork is embedded in the file. The majority of the songs that I have are in the cloud only and I cannot drag that artwork. Even if I download a file from the cloud, I cannot drag the artwork (because it doesn't have it embedded). But if I override the artwork shown in the Music app, then it is embedded and then I can copy it from the Get Info tab. I also submitted a feedback request to allow us to copy the album artwork from non-downloaded files. I encourage everyone else to submit the same feedback as well. The more requests they get, the higher they will prioritize it.

Here's hoping they fix it soon! You can see in the 10.15.1 release notes there is no mention of this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos_release_notes/macos_catalina_10_15_release_notes.

Some of you here, experiencing the same bugs as myself, wonder if Apple cared enough to fix this problem. They only care enough IF you complain loudly enough about these glitches. They listen more about software/app problems at their “feedback site”. Please post your bug experiences to that site:

p.s. - right now the iTunes bugs feedback page exists, they have not yet renamed it to “MacOS Music app feedback” (even tho it is no longer called iTunes in the new Catalina)

https://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

See Convert a song to a different file format with the Apple Music app or iTunes for Windows - Apple Support. At least converting from AIFF to Apple Lossless is a lossless transition. The resulting files are also a bit smaller and there is better tag support in ALAC over AIFF which, if I recall correctly, would also drop some other fields that iTunes has catered for in the past.

tt2

Ok, after a day or so, this is my experience with the "Music" app (aka, iTunes).

1. Music app no longer allow us to copy their album art like in iTunes. They want to "show" only for us. That's ok with me but the process is they clean up all our "existing download from Apple" artwork in the process. This cause our Album art disappeared.
2. In the same process, it screwed up our music file which embedded with our own artwork. This screw up mainly in Music app. I can still see the artwork in Finder and other software. When Music app plays those songs, the top little icon shows the artwork (but not in the main window) and took a long time to load.
3. From what I can see, Music app is analyzing all our art work even though we set the setting to "Do not get artwork from apple". Music app main focus is to remove all "previously downloaded from Apple" artwork from all our music files and take the content control back if we didn't add the artwork ourselves.

It's ok if you disagree. This is just my experience.

I just upgraded to Catalina and am having a similar issue with lots of artwork missing. I have 270 albums and only about 20% is missing so I don't have the same issue as those of you with 1000's of albums. Manually adding the albums will probably only take me an hour or two.

A couple things I noticed so far:

1. The amount of artwork that downloaded improves alphabetically by artist. All the A's downloaded as well as most of B's and C's. When you get to the D and E artists you start to get more that didn't download. Maybe Apple is working through their database alphabetically and we will see more improvement in that aspect in the future.
2. I can right click on an album and select "Get Album Artwork" and get the "could not be found" error message. If I then right click and select "Show in iTunes Store" I will often get the album with the correct artwork. The information is there but just not linked properly. FYI, "Get Album Artwork" worked about 20% of the time.
3. One time when using "Get Album Artwork" I got artwork for a completely different album from a completely different artist.

Sigh, now I can go back to finding all the programs that Catalina broke

Ok, I found something very interesting and disturbing. I want you all consider below concern before putting any more effort on this album artwork issue.

For those who are using iTunes Matches or Apple Music subscription that have Apple to upload our music, we have a huge issue: Apple is removing the album artwork entirely and I experienced that myself see below.

Steps:

1. Upload any songs or use existing songs
2. Tried both "iCloud" matched or uploaded type
3. Make sure you have the album artwork embedded to the song already, not provided by Music app (confirm from the Finder and/or 3rd party music app or tag editor)
4. Turn off "Automatically update artwork" in iTunes
5. "Remove Download" of those songs from iTunes
6. "Download" those songs back from iTunes
7. Use Finder or 3rd party app, you can see those songs album artwork have been removed. This does't make any sense. Why my songs' original artwork are being stripped by Apple, especially those songs that Apple do not have a match. This is a huge red flag and consider a bug, not a feature.

This has certainly been my experience so far. If the artwork is not embedded then Catalina 'loses' it.

I am now on my second restore back to Mojave with iTunes and I have now taken the time to check my library vigorously using some scripts from the Doug's Scripts website. I am now imaging my entire Mojave machine using Carbon Copy Cloner and will then try Catalina one more time.

The scripts I have used so far are: (they don't all relate to artwork but are worth a use)

• List MIAs
• Music Folder Files Not Added
• Super Remove Dead Tracks
• Tracks Without Embedded Artwork
• Re-Embed Artwork
• Coverscope

The last 3 all help to fix the tracks without embedded artwork, the final one I used to check the previous 2 had done their job. Now all my iTunes tracks in Mojave have embedded artwork and the library itself is just about as good as I could ever hope it to be.

I'll report back once Catalina has done its thing. That said I'm still nervous about going fro the 3rd time as there is the Notes app sync issue to also contend with. May wait until 10.15.2.

Good luck to all taking the plunge.

10.15.3 released but nothing about music app.

In addition to album art in song view missing:

• the filter search is hide by default, you have to enable every time with Shift+Command+F,
• the searching is less responsive, much slower than iTunes.
• iPhone doesn't work as remote

It's frustrating, this weekend I will downgrade to High Sierra.

Not that this is solving the issue for most of you, but here's my situation:

• Moving to a new mac. It has a smaller SSD, and hence I didn't want to do a TM migration like I usually do - wanted to tidy things up but still get my essentials across
• Both old and new machine running the same Catalina version (public beta)
• I use iTunes match, but my old mac has the master copy of everything so wanted to move this master to the other machine, so re-downloading my library from iTunes match wasn't an option.

First I tried moving over the Music folder, and option-opened Music to tell it to pick up the library. Partial success. All the tunes & playlists are there and play fine, but no album art. Like many here, I have a lot of album art that was scanned years ago and besides some of it being unobtanium (even on discogs - often not the right artwork for the CD I bought) I wasn't exactly thrilled to see it all vanish.

As with others, if I did get info on songs in the Music app, the artwork was there...it just didn't populate the list views etc. So, it must be somewhere else....

Maladominus's post with the AMPArtworkAgent link was the tip-off. I did this:

• Use activity monitor to quit AMPArtworkAgent on both source and destination macs
• Delete NEW mac's copy of ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent (this had some artwork in it, probably from an earlier attempted download from iTunes match)
• Copy the com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent folder over from the OLD mac's ~/Library/Containers
• Start Music app on new mac; AMPArtworkAgent auto-started

....and I have all my art back. Phew. Posting this here in case it helps others.

With the above mentioned script I was able to restore like 95% of the album artwork in my library. The artwork that remains missing is artwork I downloaded through the iTunes Store after importing a CD. The function in Music to add artwork remains unresponsive. I'll leave it like this for a while and see if there's a solution for this.

Facts

1. 95% of my library are ripped CD's
2. I tried iTunes Match for a while
3. I tried Apple Music for a while
4. So there must be some kind of iCloud Music Library for my account
5. Don't know if 3 and 4 are the bug resulting in the disappearance of 99% of my album artwork in my library.

Strangely in Catalina my Music library files do not show the album art in finder attached to the files as they do for the exact same iTunes library pre-Catalina. So did the move to Catalina somehow corrupt my music files? This is slightly more disturbing than thinking that Music is just taking a long time to catalog my library, or somehow cache the images.

By the way: this image is of the same music file on two different computers which had the exact same iTunes library before I upgraded one of the machines to Catalina and Music. On the left is the new version...

I suspect rough language will serve no one in this thread.

Day 1, catalina update. I can see every album i own, but with no covers. I can see covers just on Finder and On the little top icon while i'm listening to

Day 2 Early Moning, same situation.

Late Morning, Music don't see my library and i don't know why

Day 3 Same Situation, Music don't see my library but the setting is ok...