Album art in Music for Catalina

Here's what worked for me after trying a million other things: Delete all music files entirely and then use the data migration function (Main screen-Go-Migration Assistant) to migrate your music from a good backup. That fixed everything and was the only way I could get my album art back.

My problem is a bit different, and I would love a solution! I just upgraded to Catalina, and all of the artwork appears correctly in the Music app on my new iMac, but did not sync correctly to my iPhone 11 Pro. Also, there are songs that won't play and display messages that I don't have permission, yet they appear as normal in my Music library on the desktop (and are from CDs that I own and burned into my library!). Before upgrading my phone and desktop, these songs played without problems.

To get my iPhone to work I had to wipe it clean (restore as a new phone) and then resync everything. I use a cable and not the cloud. I needed to do this to get music and photos correct on my iPhone.

Please can you set out the process you used? I have a "Time Machine" back up to an external hard drive, and I have remained on Mojave pending a solution to all this! Like you and most participants, I have ripped my extensive CD collection in Lossless, and use iTunes as my organiser and streaming centre, complete with accurate album artwork!

Many Thanks

Step 1: Delete all music files entirely. For me this was trashing the Music folder completely.

Step 2. Connect external backup and then use the data migration function (Main screen-Go-Migration Assistant) to select the music file on the external drive and tell it to "migrate" to the new location.

another thing worth trying would be to delete the Music folder and then use a Time Machine backup and restore just the music folder.

Very frustrating for sure.

I have just had an online chat with Apple Support. The person I chatted to spent some minutes researching, and confirmed that Apple Technicians are aware of the issues (artwork) and this will be dealt with in a later upgrade. No time scale, I'm afraid, but I am hopeful that our issues are notice, noted and will be acted upon.

I have the same issue. The artwork is still there in the songs' metadata, it's there when I click "Get Info" but it just doesn't show. Not in one single view mode. More than that, what really makes me hate the new Music app is that (for no valid reason) they threw away the "Always show album artwork" option in Playlist view. There is space in the window for the artwork but the option's just not there! And it was my main viewing option for playlists where I added music in a special order. Really hope Apple's gonna fix it in the upcoming updates. Please do!

I have this problem too. Tedious work of scanning importing my huge music library and applying the artwork - gone after update. Sometimes the Artwork is actually still in the meta of the file. So Get Info on a track -> click artwork -> command + X to cut out -> command + V to re-paste the same artwork -> close the info window -> artwork shows. The problem is not unique to Apple Music. This also is happening in Library on AppleTV App

Thanks for making the call to Apple Support, Nick. I reverted back to Mojave and won't upgrade to Catalina anytime soon. I enjoy using my iTunes library (with the convenience of album artwork) too much, and honestly, I haven't seen anything in Catalina that makes me want to 'upgrade'.

Apple recently released update 10.15.2 that was suppose to fix the album artwork issue. It has not. Still lots of lost art, and lost songs stripped from music. Oddly. many are the first song in an album..

They should have left iTunes alone, and done a work around.

I am experiencing the same issue as well, waited patiently for an update Catalina 10.15.2 . Update came and still no album Artwork. I know the artwork did not go anywhere i checked the sub files. And the screen saver album artwork still works

Just like they "fixed" Finder's tabs last time? (Closing Finder [Clicking the Red X] results in ALL your prior tabs being lost. This was NEVER the case before as Finder should retain your tabs no matter what you do to it or the tabs are useless!) Apple's quality is getting worse with every release. We never got a fix for this and in Catalina this problem still exists.

I didn't see this thread prior to moving to Catalina last night. Once Music began to loop infinitely doing its Album Art thing I did a search and found this.

Then...wiped my disk and restored Mojave...not going waste my valuable time trying to fix the mess they made.

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.

My artwork all seems to be embedded, but I'm wondering how many days/weeks/months it will take to update/catalog all of these files? I'm not interested in the, "Get Album Artwork" function as I've spent over a decade ensuring the artwork that I want is associated with each file.

Is there a way to force Music to index all of this embedded artwork? I tried selecting all of my music and changing an attribute of the files, (equalizer) but that doesn't seem to have worked.

Is there a way to prepare an iTunes library for this problem prior to moving to Catalina/Music? I moved my library on a backup machine because I don't trust major updates like this anymore.., so is there any way to pre condition my library on my main machine before I, "upgrade"?

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.