Album art in Music for Catalina

All my album art appeared to be gone after doing a clean install of Catalina. In "Albums" view I selected an album, Right-Clicked Get Info, and saw the artwork. So I selected "Artwork", dragged the image to the desktop, deleted the artwork from Get Info/Album Artwork window, then dragged the Artwork from the desktop back to the Album Artwork window, and Bingo, Artwork back for that album. After doing this on my first 10 albums, and realizing the artwork is attached to the MP3 file and not being retrieved from the Artwork Folder, I deleted my Album Artwork Folder (freeing up over 1GB), and continued the process on the next 10 albums.

My question is: is there a way to automate, or batch this process?

IE: Right-Click an album, select Get Info, Select Artwork, Drag the Artwork to the desktop, Delete the Get Info Artwork (by hitting Delete after dragging the artwork to the desktop), then either dragging the artwork from the desktop back to the Artwork window, or selecting Add Artwork and selecting the desktop file.

None of my artwork seems to be updating, and unless Apple fixes this, I'm afraid I'll have to do this for all my 1500+ albums...

Man Apple really screwed this up. I have about 5000 albums, and it has spent the last 2 days killing my computer by ramping up the CPU usage and the memory. It slowly loads artwork. The all of a sudden it stopped. The artwork is there but not shown for some albums, because I can see it in the mini player. This is truly painful, especially since I have spent the last 10 years growing a meticulously maintained set of music. Now it looks like I will have to rebuild it.

My artwork all loaded fine but I've found now that if I delete or edit artwork on some tracks the time shows an additional 16 seconds (approx). The track isn't actually any longer and plays for the original time length but shows in the time column as a new, longer time.

Definitely some problem with the tagging now! 🤨

That's all well in good if the only thing you have on your computer is top 40 tracks, but I have tons of albums that Itunes doesn't even sell that were ripped from vinyl. Itunes does not have the artwork for those. Yes, my artwork was embedded, and now Apple Music just shows a blank cover. When you play the songs, the artwork shows in the mini player, so it is there still embedded. Apple did not think this all the way through before releasing this application. My computer sat for days "loading artwork" and during that time it was unusable since Music was using 95% CPU and eating all of the memory. It utilized so much memory that my iMac kernel panicked twice and shutdown. Some album art also got changed to some version that Apple has in their database, which is incorrect. The Blues Brothers Movie Soundtrack shows a pair of sunglasses, not John Belushi and Dan Akroyd sitting on the hood of their cop car. This is because Apple has many holes in their music database. Now we are really paying for that. After loading forever, the process just quit, and now nothing is happening, leaving hundreds of unresolved files. Is there any way to force it to start the process again.? That way I at least will not have to find hundreds of album covers.

I have found that several of the tracks on albums, possibly all of my 53K's worth of songs have an extra 16/17 seconds worth of song at the end!!!!!! SO for example on Sgt Pepper the penultimate track should be 1:21 but it cuts out and plays the last 17 seconds over again. Very disconcerting to say the least!!! This has to be a bug, shoddy coding or whatever Apple wants to pass it off as!! Interesting thing is the same track plays normally on my phone, so synching music isn't being affected, thank god. So how do we get Apple to sort this out FAST!!!

Good point.

Apple new Music app suck up 200% of my CPU power and 100GB of RAM. I have 40GB physical RAM and used up all and need more.

There are so many bugs in this new Music app. It is not ready for release. Apple, please fix it ASAP.

I'm using a 2018 Mac Mini i5 version 8gb ram. I have about 1.4tb of music. Mostly alac converted files and 50 percent itunes purchased Music. I also have 300gb of Music Videos.

I stupidly upgraded to Catalina and found the application so slow, that I gave up. If I tried to play music while it scanned and downloaded artwork as it updated tracks. My tracks started not to been found.

The program can't even update apples' own music forget my custom art work.

I also recently bought a Samsung S10+ (1tb) loaded my Itunes in to power amp. The program scanned and downloaded missing art. 99 percent of artwork was there with no problems. A mobile phone app is more efficient than my Mac.

I've decide to use my Itunes on my Macbook Pro 2012 running Mojave until they fix this.

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.

OMG. I did. and it also contains albums WITH album artwork. And I am pretty sure this is some of the old artwork I made myself......

the story continues :-)

I considered going back to Mojave, but then I am stuck with reminders which do not sync with my iPhone...

Let's all cheer out: Apple, Apple, Apple forever.

What I do NOT have is excessive CPU usage. it is about 35%

Alternative, for both iTunes/Music and iPhone app, there are plenty. Just google it. (I don’t have any recommendations). However, to have a seamless integration between all Apple devices, I think there may not be one out there. I use iTunes Match and it really save a lot of disc space in all my Apple devices. This tight me back to Apple software.

I lost a lot of cover art for albums I ripped from real CDs that I own. When they were ripped, iTunes could not locate cover art for them, and I had to laboriously scan in the covers (laborious because the CDs are stored in very dense loose-leaf collections ring-binders in the house, but I keep the jackets in deep storage).

I'm pretty depressed that iTunes/Music would opt to delete existing cover art when it itself had found no replacement. "Do no harm" always seems to be the better paradigm.

I've done a little searching around but I have never invested any time in how iTunes/Music stores its data, and I have tripped over no obvious subdirectory of TIFFs or JPGs of previous cover art.

Time Machine is not an option -- since I don't have the Music internals to explain how this happened, I'd be jumping into the flames to just bulk-restore my old library in place. I'm almost certain that would make things worse.

Also strange: I built the smart playlist of Album Artwork:False . I randomly sampled it, asking Music to show me some of the affected albums with "Show Album in iTune Store".

Some of the albums are in the store with artwork, yet "Get Album Artwork" refuses to bring it down. In every case (so far), it's a CD I bought at a brick and mortar store - not iTunes. That I own the real, physical thing does not entitle me to get the album artwork from Apple. One can imagine all the legal mumbo-jumbo that might make this the case.

Are we seeing Apple strong-arming us all into subscribing to Music? Paying to enjoy stuff we already owned...?

Even so, I think there's some liability incurred if they wipe the album artwork I had already gathered manually.

Maybe if there's some free trial for Music, I can join, get my artwork, then not renew.

Rather than trying to rectify this situation for each of my albums, I'm hoping that they will approach this as a serious bug and resolve it so I can move forward from Mojave to Catalina on my main machine without this corruption of my library. I would suggest not transitioning to Catalina and the new Music app for anyone who has a decent sized personal library of music ripped from CD, or not purchased from iTunes.

Giving apple the benefit of the doubt that they will take this bug seriously and attempt resolution, I recommend that people step back to Mojave if they have a viable backup from before. I'm not sure how that is done.., but that would be my course of action if I had not moved to Catalina on a test machine.

If Apple has the albums you are seeking on their store, the titles probably have to match what is on your computer exactly. I tried this with one of my albums that lost its art and the new Music app was able to get the artwork. Unfortunately this does not embed the artwork, which is the crux of this problem. You need to keep your artwork embedded in the files if you wish to ensure that this does not happen again. Dougscript has a good script to do this, but at the moment it does not run on Catalina.

Thanks for that. I'm not a techie and i'm sitting on 1200 albums on Mojave 10.14.6. I stupidly upgraded to Catalina but fortunately with the help of Time Machine and a hard drive back up reverted back to Mojave. I had a look at Dougscript but wasn't sure which version to use. There's a lot of headings there that are very similar. Can you help? Thanks in advance