Album art in Music for Catalina

There's a tag editor in the App Store called Meta that makes managing your music collection much easier. My album art embedded in each track has stayed in place so far. I'm assuming everyone has updated to Catalina 10.15.

1. Move your music files somewhere safe if they're on your Mac in an iTunes/Music folder and not on an external drive/NAS
2. Delete all albums from Music and close it (don't delete the music files like I did 😬)
3. Go to your User Folder > Music and delete the second Music folder in there (which contains a Media folder and Library file)
4. If your music is stored externally, go there and delete the two "Automatically Add To. . ." folders and the hidden PLIST file (Shift + Command + . will show hidden files)
5. Add your albums back to Music using File > Add To Library and and the artwork should start to show on your Mac and iPhone when it re-syncs

The artist pictures will eventually show up too. Also seems to take a while before the artwork shows up in Get Info.

I'm not sure what part of this made things work correctly though. But just make sure you don't accidentally delete your music files. Run Time Machine first, put them on a flash drive, copy them to your downloads folder, etc.

Listen up everybody. You have to play every single song in your libary in order to get all the music artwork back again on your iphone when you sync it. Just play every song in 1-2 second on itunes on your computer and then when you sync it to your iphone the exact artwork will show up again.

Same issue here... a couple observations: When I go to print, and print album list, the artwork print fine! Just all the icons are blank in Music. Also, I have started and restated multiple times (safe mode, etc) and the data file "Music Library" always stops ate 114 MB, that's where it always stalls. On a couple occasions, artowkr did load for the most recent added, but always stalled at the same spot/album. I deleted that album to see if that's what caused it, ut made no difference, stalled in the same sequence place.

I let it run for 3 days now and no progress at all. Apple support has been of no help so far....

account12, I noticed this exact same behavior. I also use iTunes Match and have meticulously updated all the metadata and embedded artwork. All of my curated music has been in iTunes Match for a while and was working well so I removed local files on my Mac to free up space (I have a back up on my NAS).

Now with the Catalina update, all re-downloaded music is missing the embedded artwork. The Music App does show the artwork in the Get Info tab but you cannot see it in Finder. I also used AtomicParsley (a metadata command line utility) to extract the artwork from the file and it is indeed missing.

I noticed that if you have the files locally, and update the album artwork, it does properly embed the artwork in the file. But the initial download or any artwork edited without a local file will not include embedded artwork in subsequent downloads. That is a MAJOR problem for those of us that took months to get our large music collection curated and keep it in iTunes Match. That prevents that artwork from being available to other apps like Plex.

I spoke with several people on Apple Support and they say this is by design in the new Music App. I suggested that they "fix" this design and they asked me to submit a request on https://www.apple.com/feedback/. I would highly encourage anyone who spent a long time adding custom album artwork to use this link to request that Apple add a way to embed the album artwork into the file upon download.

Also, I saw a user report that they could not copy the album artwork from iTunes and another user reported they could drag and drop the artwork. What I have found is that you can only copy or drag the artwork if the artwork is embedded in the file. The majority of the songs that I have are in the cloud only and I cannot drag that artwork. Even if I download a file from the cloud, I cannot drag the artwork (because it doesn't have it embedded). But if I override the artwork shown in the Music app, then it is embedded and then I can copy it from the Get Info tab. I also submitted a feedback request to allow us to copy the album artwork from non-downloaded files. I encourage everyone else to submit the same feedback as well. The more requests they get, the higher they will prioritize it.

Here's hoping they fix it soon! You can see in the 10.15.1 release notes there is no mention of this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos_release_notes/macos_catalina_10_15_release_notes.

Respectfully, adding artwork manually is only feasible for small music collections. Mine has 7,300+ albums, so I have chosen to go back to Mojave, where everything works, and all of my album artwork is present and visible. Work-arounds, manual fixes, etc., aren't up to the standards to which we've become accustomed for Apple. (I'm personally satisfied with Mojave in general. I have yet to hear anyone rave about any other features of Catalina that would tempt me to accept a substandard music experience.)

Not that this is solving the issue for most of you, but here's my situation:

• Moving to a new mac. It has a smaller SSD, and hence I didn't want to do a TM migration like I usually do - wanted to tidy things up but still get my essentials across
• Both old and new machine running the same Catalina version (public beta)
• I use iTunes match, but my old mac has the master copy of everything so wanted to move this master to the other machine, so re-downloading my library from iTunes match wasn't an option.

First I tried moving over the Music folder, and option-opened Music to tell it to pick up the library. Partial success. All the tunes & playlists are there and play fine, but no album art. Like many here, I have a lot of album art that was scanned years ago and besides some of it being unobtanium (even on discogs - often not the right artwork for the CD I bought) I wasn't exactly thrilled to see it all vanish.

As with others, if I did get info on songs in the Music app, the artwork was there...it just didn't populate the list views etc. So, it must be somewhere else....

Maladominus's post with the AMPArtworkAgent link was the tip-off. I did this:

• Use activity monitor to quit AMPArtworkAgent on both source and destination macs
• Delete NEW mac's copy of ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent (this had some artwork in it, probably from an earlier attempted download from iTunes match)
• Copy the com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent folder over from the OLD mac's ~/Library/Containers
• Start Music app on new mac; AMPArtworkAgent auto-started

....and I have all my art back. Phew. Posting this here in case it helps others.

Hfiennes, thanks for posting that.

I'm trying to migrate my itunes stuff from macpro highsierra to imac catalina clean install, and have been struggling with the artwork problem. I have lots of private video that is totally lacking artwork, thumbnails, in catalina now. In TV app, of course. I have a simple question; there is no com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent folder on the HS mac, do you know where I should look? (Another solution for me would be if I new a way to tell the TV app to recreate artwork for the files.)

There is no AMPArtworkAgen folder pre catalina apparently, so no work.

I think we're stranded - getting my iTunes library, with artwork, properly transferred to catalina Music and TV seems not possible.

I'm slowly starting to manually rebuild the playlists while hoping for a update that will ease the troubles.

I used the script one album at a time. I selected all the songs in the album and ran the script. I then went back to album view. That was the only way I could get the artwork to display properly. Good luck

ReEmbed Artwork worked for me, but I did both anyways to make sure. I wasn't selecting all the songs first in the Music app and then clicking proceed. Once I did that as it said in the instructions it finally worked. Goodluck

The artwork shows up in the player thumbnail but is missing in the app view for me.

iTunes downloads look ok, but many of my own added are affected

Noticed the same. Some albums are appearing though so I am hoping that the artwork will be slowly added back over time. We’ll see.

Since you are still on Mojave, I would suggest running Dougscript to embed all of the artwork in the music files.

Hi any improvement or resolution? Thanks

Please can you advise how to ensure artwork is embedded. Thanks.