Album art in Music for Catalina

What I found was that I had to rebuild the music app database file by hitting the option key while loading music app. When it asked to choose a library, I directed it to the original .itl file for itunes and it asked me to give a new name for a new library. After waiting a bit, it got all the album art for the files that I had previously embedded or purchased from Amazon. The rest I did the Get album art and 90% of those came in. There are a few that still don't, even though Apple's itunes store shows they have it (e.g. Adele's 19 album, seriously???).

So, my remedy so far has been the following. On albums with no art displaying for the album view, click the album "Play" button. If a thumbnail of the album appears up top, you can drag that art to your desktop. Then Get Info on your album and drag artwork back in.

You'll now have the artwork back. It's a laborious, manual process but may save you from re-scanning photos that aren't in the apple library or store.

Another issue is that some albums may be in the store and you can get their artwork with "Get Album Artwork" but you first have to ensure you have the SAME exact album title as they have in the store - no variation. Also, for example, you might have the regular version of the album, but it won't load artwork because Apple's server has the "Deluxe Edition" table after the title in the store now (not just the regular version you might have purchased). Thus, even if you have the regular version if you want the the art to load, you'll have to retitle your album to be "Greatest Hits (Deluxe Edition)" or whatever it might be.

Hope this helps.

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...

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 just now went into music>preferences and turned off Automatically Update Artwork, and slowly but surely, it started adding the tagged artwork. In the time that it took me to type that first sentence, when I went back to Music, art that was there a few seconds ago is gone again.

This is my issue also. I have a combination of 5000 purchased, matched, and uploaded rips and I have meticulously curated the artwork on all of these these, meaning I have customized artwork on most, but have also left the artwork alone on purchased items if it is correct. When I open the new Music App in Catalina, about 90% of the artwork is missing from each type (purchased, ripped and uploaded, matched... ones that I have customized, ones I have left alone... makes no difference). When I wait several minutes almost all of the artwork finally appears. Then after more time it randomly disappears, then reappears after more time, then disappears, etc. If I close the app and then reopen, it starts out as missing, but then reappears, disappears, reappears, etc. I don't think this has anything to with whether the artwork is "embedded" or not. Also I have stopped using the "Automatically Update Artwork" in preferences, or the "Get Album Artwork" by right clicking on a Song/Album many years ago because all too frequently it gets the wrong artwork (i.e. many times old iTunes would download artwork from a greatest hits album for a song, rather than get artwork from the original album that I ripped it from, etc.), so I have not turned that on in the new Music app.

Sorry, but this does noting to solve the problem. It eventually loads all of the artwork, just as the initial upgrade to Catalina did, but then most of it continues to disappear/reappear at random intervals. All this technique did is replicate what Catalina already did.

Hmmmm, at least for me I may have noticed something. The random disappear/reappear may not be so random. I am also running a Plex server that was set to scan my iTunes library. Will shut down the server for a while to see if that resolves anything.

Um, double Hmm you still may be onto something. I pretty much determined that my disappear/reappear problem might be from my Plex server scanning my music library. As stated before I did what you said (saving a copy of the original "new Music Library.musiclibray" that Catalina created just in case) and that did not seem to solve the problem. So I deleted the rebuild that was created using your steps, and went back to the original that Catalina created... and everything now works. I still see a momentary screen refresh when Plex server scan my library, but no more lost artwork. I still think your method may very well recover other people's artwork for those that aren't able to ever get it to load.

Hi, please see my replies to AntonioRADOSAV. You are correct the artwork has always been there and was never actually deleted, and it appears my problem has now been solved. An interesting point. When my artwork was in its "disappeared" phase, Right-Click>Get Info>Artwork indicated that there was no artwork. When the Artwork would reappear, Right-Click>Get Info> Artwork would show artwork.

Yes, it does appear like the Catalina Supplemental Update may have resolved the issue. I tentatively reopened Music with the Album Artwork folder in place, and without having rebuilt my Music Library like a few people have suggested (ie. I was using the same one that had been created by the initial Catalina install).

Music immediately showed Loading Artwork, Loading Artist Artwork (this one was new), and Updating iCloud Library. The app did grow to 17 GB after a while, but album artwork was loading up little by little in my Up Next list.

This process stopped after 10–15 minutes, and my album artwork all seems to be there. Music is sitting at 24 GB, but it’s not using up any CPU (other than playing music), and neither is AMPArtworkAgent. In fact, this latter process is now unloaded, whereas previously it would be constantly running, spiking at 100%, even when Music wasn’t showing any activity.

Fingers crossed. If you’re running Catalina and have disabled automatic updates, make sure you open Software Updates in System Preferences and install this update.

this helped for me:

1)rename your old iTunes music folder (where the music files are in)

2)Start from scratch with a blank music libraryin the music app

3)import the music files from 1 in to the new music library

lots of them will already have artwork

4)Select all albums and get artwork.

I recovered 95% of 1000 albums artwork.

this helped for me:

1)rename your old iTunes music folder (where the music files are in)

2)Start from scratch with a blank music libraryin the music app

3)import the music files from 1 in to the new music library

lots of them will already have artwork

4)Select all albums and get artwork.

I recovered 95% of 1000 albums artwork.

I found a solution that's working for me. Doug's AppleScripts (https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2019/10/some-artwork-scripts-updated/) has 2 scripts that are very useful. "Save Album Art to Album Folder" and "Restore Artwork from Album Folder". Nice work Doug!

In addition to the artwork being an issue, I have also noticed other issues with how the music appears to be organized. When I add new files, they are getting duplicated. It is miscategorizing songs into different albums even though they are on the same album. I cannot copy and paste artwork from certain albums to other albums. There are just a lot of issues. For some of the albums missing artwork, I can clearly see the artwork is still associate with the file in the Finder.