Album art in Music for Catalina

You can try using File > Library > Get Album Artwork to get Music to fetch missing artwork. Failing that you should be able to manually add images via Song Info.

tt2

Eek, that look like Music failed to import your iTunes library properly. Unfortunately I don't yet see an update to this document that deals with the same issue in Catalina If you don't see your entire library after you update iTunes on your Mac or PC - Apple Support, however it seems that you use the option to Switch libraries with the Music app or Apple TV app in macOS Catalina - Apple Support you should be able to open a selected iTunes library with the Music app and have it updated.

tt2

I got the albums that has embedded artwork to display by forcing the music app to build a new database file by holding the option key and choosing the original iTunes itl file. It asked for a new location of the music database file.

I still don’t have everything but it was significantly better than the default built file after the upgrade.

It did not work for me. still a lot missing. as someone else said, it is what was done at upgrade time.

BUT: I made a smart playlist with albums without artwork. And guess: it contained albums with artwork. SO I selected all songs of that album, went to info, artwork, selected the artwork which was there and guess: bingo!. it disappears from the smart playlist!

furthermore the smart playlist refers to songs which do not exist anymore......

I fixed mine by logging out of music (Account -> Sign out). Quit the music app. Then go into finder, then music and deleting the main music folder. After this, go back into music, log in and turn on iCloud music library sync. It should fix it!

This has certainly been my experience so far. If the artwork is not embedded then Catalina 'loses' it.

I am now on my second restore back to Mojave with iTunes and I have now taken the time to check my library vigorously using some scripts from the Doug's Scripts website. I am now imaging my entire Mojave machine using Carbon Copy Cloner and will then try Catalina one more time.

The scripts I have used so far are: (they don't all relate to artwork but are worth a use)

• List MIAs
• Music Folder Files Not Added
• Super Remove Dead Tracks
• Tracks Without Embedded Artwork
• Re-Embed Artwork
• Coverscope

The last 3 all help to fix the tracks without embedded artwork, the final one I used to check the previous 2 had done their job. Now all my iTunes tracks in Mojave have embedded artwork and the library itself is just about as good as I could ever hope it to be.

I'll report back once Catalina has done its thing. That said I'm still nervous about going fro the 3rd time as there is the Notes app sync issue to also contend with. May wait until 10.15.2.

Good luck to all taking the plunge.

Did you update your Catalina to the last version. There is a over 900MB update that fix the Music app.

Was all of your album art embedded? The Music app on Catalina likely has a new approach to indexing album art from iTunes so you may need to wait for it to catalogue it all. If you play an album in iTunes does the artwork show up in the grid?

tt2

Hi,

Firstly, I had to search the internet to find missing album art. Once I found them and saved them I opened the Music app on my Macbook,

I right clicked on an album I wanted to add the album art to, select Get Info, then Artwork, and Add Artwork. It will open Finder and you select the album art which you have downloaded.

it will take some time if you have many albums. Once you had downloaded the new album art and added it with the process I mentioned, sync your device.

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.

There is no rhyme or reason. Show "Albums", right click over an album missing cover art, click on "get album art" from the list and then hit return many of the art works magically appear, but some do not. That means a manual adding of the artwork for those that don't appear.

latest catalina upgrade has fixed this - reloaded music from my lats iTunes library and all album artwork appears to have been loaded - I think we did it with this thread plus the bug reports!

If only we could get a column view back - eg in genre view getting an artist view rather than a list of all albums in the genre

*UPDATE FAIL*

I've updated my main computer to Catalina 10.15.1 and Music failed with the artwork again, this time approximately 484 songs with lost artwork. Totally weird given that it is the exact same iTunes library that I had just copied over to my other machine and successfully migrated into Music 1.0.1.37.

At least in my situation I can just copy that library back to my main machine, but I think the take away is that transitioning from Mojave to Catalina is not fixed for the Music app and losing album cover art.

I did this it only found part of my custom artwork. I have about 75 percent of my total artwork. A large part have embedded artwork which appear in the thumbnail but not in full album mode.

I have duplicated my library on external hard drives in case it went wrong. ( I have a few macs not updated to Catalina)

The updates from Apple have made the update more responsive. But still have not corrected all the bugs. I would still wait to see if they make more fixes.

I find the artwork on my albums loads slower then my iTunes when I scroll up and down quickly. My Catalina is on a Mac i5. 2018 8gb ram. While my Mojave’s runs on 2012 and 2015 MacBook Pro with 8gb ram.

When I close the app and reopen it, it loses some of my artwork again. So for me the music app is a bit buggy. I will just maintain a Mojave and Catalina music library separately. Until Catalina is fixed.

It did not change anything for me. All problems remain. (I have my library on an external disk because it is too large to fit on the computer's disk.)

All tracks have album art embedded, but they show up only if I go to a track, cut the artwork, then paste it back in. Moreover, if I plug my external hard drive into a different Mac (also running 10.15.3), all artwork is now lost again. Moreover, all settings (e.g., playlist viewed as songs and sorted by year) reverts to default. Similarly, AMPLibrar still runs after quitting Music so external drive cannot be ejected without either force quit or finding the process id of AMPLibrar and killing it.

One issue seems to be that Music stores information not where your library actually is (i.e., the external drive) but in /Users/yourname/Library. This means when you plug the hard drive into a different computer (also running 10.15.3), you lose everything such as (1) the artwork you manually restored, (2) a playlist you sorted by year now reverts to sorted by album, etc. etc. and so on and so forth.