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...

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 had the same problem and only during the last couple of days, I could get the artwork back.

I had to do two things in sequence (after tweaking with a lot of possibilities...):

(1) Delete the albums without artwork and import them back (Command-o). The easiest way for me to do it was to select all those albums from within the Music app, delete them all together (while preserving the original files), and import the whole library again; this takes time, but it's not a tedious job (even simpler, though even more time consuming, could be just to delete the entire library and import it back). This way nothing happens with the albums already loaded, but (most of) the ones with missing artwork are loaded with the artwork.

(2) This step was for the albums that remained without artwork after step 1. Weirdly, not even manual addition of the artwork would do it (I could add it with the appropriate tab in "Get info", but it wouldn't be saved!). I then realised I wasn't syncing my library with my other devices and decided to do it. And after some hours, voilá!, the missing artwork was back. To be honest, a single album remained artworkless: Led Zepelin's "The song remains the same"; at this point I simply deleted it!

Hi, I found the folder in the ~LIbrary/Containers/ folder; the artwork folder is called com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent. I opened the folder to see what was in it, and I had to thread my way through subfolders to find the images. Look for AMPArtworkAgent/data/documents/artwork. I saw a lot of my album artwork. Is it all there? Frankly, my library is so large that I didn't try to confirm that the 1,904 items in that folder are all that was there in iTunes before the upgrade.

Then I just waited. I kept Music loaded in memory (and on the desktop) and ran my laptop overnight, at least for 24 hours. By that time, 95% of the artwork was back. Since then, no additional artwork has returned.

I'm not sure what the issue is: reorganisation, indexing, syncing with the Apple Music Store? Maybe all of them making a perfect storm. Given Apple's usual way of "resolving" these issues, we can expect to wait for the black box that is Apple software coding to spit out a revision. In my experience, communication on issues like these has never been Apple's strong suit.

cakasabian - Are you still having this issue? I did too... here's my status....

I purchased a new MacBook Pro in January... out of the box on Catalina... After hours and hours (and to date 4 months), I have gotten to the executive team support. We've recorded the issue... engineering has been able to re-create the issue. They seem to know what the issue is and that it does exist.

The issue as it seems is that changing any metadata and then playing a track will create an issue (sometimes you have to leave the Music app before it explodes your album). It seems that this is also related to missing artwork. I've stopped using my Music app completely because it's wrecking my library.

The good news... they know the issue exists now. The bad news... my executive rep can't commit to when the issue will be resolved. Great experience with them after reaching the executive team and in working to identify the issue, but now it's up to me to wait and see if and when it is resolved. So basically kicked to the curb with no commitment from them to follow up with me unless engineering needs more info. IMO it should've never made it through beta testing.

I'm hopeful that the update will happen in the next iOS update, but there has only been one of those in the four months I've owned the newest laptop. I would urge you to contact the executive team and report the issue -- I emailed Mr. Cook (once) and Mr. Federighi (twice) before being contacted.

To see the issue in action, simply change the name of any album (add an extra word to the end to make it easy to find). Play tracks off the newly named album... exit the app.... wait for awhile... and ta-da your stuff should be jacked up when you enter the app again.

As you can guess, with over 12000 album titles, I'm kinda cranky about the mess!

As more people stated: select all albums, right click and press get album artwork. Have patience and most of it will appear.

good luck

I stumbled over TAGR. It’s in the App Store. It does exactly what you want and more.

A good instruction is here: https://youtu.be/HMvHU0E-Dro