Album art in Music for Catalina

Thank you

Has anyone seen an improvement or change in this long standing issue since Big Sur was launched? Thank You All

I was hoping Big Sur would fix the problem but it doesn't.

I am not convinced that Apple knows, is interested, or cares about the Music app or former iTunes users. There has been no response to this issue by Apple. Just my two cents

Thanks Jeff. Excellent idea. Do you have some high level email contact details you can share? Thanks.

OK, the next morning after I installed Catalina (and posted here) my artwork appeared. I am noticing that the artwork disappears when I scroll and slowly reappears after I stop scrolling. I am on a older laptop (Mid 2012 MacBook Pro) and I'm considering an upgrade. However, I'd like to retain this laptop for ripping CDs as it has the built-in CD drive which is faster than my external one.

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.

Since upgrading from Mojave to Catalina (also latest version) I have this annoying bug: 20% of my entire albums/singles lost their artwork. I hope Apple will fix this because I spent a lot of time in ordering my entire library.

now instead of Album artwork I have gray apple note, even in Mini Player.

I too have contacted support as respects this item.

I am delaying upgrading to Catalina until this is sorted. Like everyone else, I love my music and associated accurate artwork, and have absolutely no desire to research and reload countless albums. If anyone develops a sure fire fix, please post! Thanks to all.

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 am more confused than ever by this. My music library is on an external disk. All music came from CDs I own, and all artwork is embedded in each file. When I connect the external disk to my old laptop (a 2013 MBP), the artwork shows up in Music. When I connect the disk to my newer laptop (a 2018 MBP), there is no artwork. Both machines are running up-to-date Catalina. I cannot figure out what the difference is. Further, if I sync an iPod (yes, I'm still using an iPod) on the old laptop that shows the artwork, the artwork shows up on the iPod. If instead I sync it with the new laptop that isn't showing the artwork, there's no artwork on the iPod. I have no idea why it is working on one laptop but not on the other.

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.

This is a HUGE problem for me as well. I have thousands of artists with multiple albums each and Songs was my default view. I can't tell the albums apart easily because there is no artwork displayed!! Why the **** would Apple do this? Luckily I can downgrade to El Capitan. But I shouldn't have to.

I have ~50,000 songs 99% Apple Lossless imported directly from the CD. I scanned and attached the CD artwork as jpegs to the albums (mostly multiple images per cd). On conversion to Music from iTunes the conversion stalled several times and seemed to overload the cpu until it stopped. I kept crash records although Apple help did not seem interested in them. Through Music help at Apple I eventually ran a safe mode startup and had the conversion successfully complete. Unfortunate I lost 60% of my artwork. Sometimes the album cover shows up but the other attached images do not. Some of my scanned images exist in a separate "scanned image file" but many the ones attached in the earlier iTunes version seem to have disappeared. In some cases I can see the scanned images in My scanner file and just re-aatach them. The location where the images are is a mystery to me. I noticed that as you add the artwork to the album the action is described as "processing message". Does this mean anything to anybody re what is happening in Music when artwork is being attached? ie where are "messages" stored or referenced? I am slowly re-scanning old artwork and re-attaching to Music but am greatly disappointed in having to go through this process.