Album art in Music for Catalina

I had the same problem and only during the last couple of days, I could get the artwork back.

I had to do two things in sequence (after tweaking with a lot of possibilities...):

(1) Delete the albums without artwork and import them back (Command-o). The easiest way for me to do it was to select all those albums from within the Music app, delete them all together (while preserving the original files), and import the whole library again; this takes time, but it's not a tedious job (even simpler, though even more time consuming, could be just to delete the entire library and import it back). This way nothing happens with the albums already loaded, but (most of) the ones with missing artwork are loaded with the artwork.

(2) This step was for the albums that remained without artwork after step 1. Weirdly, not even manual addition of the artwork would do it (I could add it with the appropriate tab in "Get info", but it wouldn't be saved!). I then realised I wasn't syncing my library with my other devices and decided to do it. And after some hours, voilá!, the missing artwork was back. To be honest, a single album remained artworkless: Led Zepelin's "The song remains the same"; at this point I simply deleted it!

Hi, I found the folder in the ~LIbrary/Containers/ folder; the artwork folder is called com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent. I opened the folder to see what was in it, and I had to thread my way through subfolders to find the images. Look for AMPArtworkAgent/data/documents/artwork. I saw a lot of my album artwork. Is it all there? Frankly, my library is so large that I didn't try to confirm that the 1,904 items in that folder are all that was there in iTunes before the upgrade.

Then I just waited. I kept Music loaded in memory (and on the desktop) and ran my laptop overnight, at least for 24 hours. By that time, 95% of the artwork was back. Since then, no additional artwork has returned.

I'm not sure what the issue is: reorganisation, indexing, syncing with the Apple Music Store? Maybe all of them making a perfect storm. Given Apple's usual way of "resolving" these issues, we can expect to wait for the black box that is Apple software coding to spit out a revision. In my experience, communication on issues like these has never been Apple's strong suit.

cakasabian - Are you still having this issue? I did too... here's my status....

I purchased a new MacBook Pro in January... out of the box on Catalina... After hours and hours (and to date 4 months), I have gotten to the executive team support. We've recorded the issue... engineering has been able to re-create the issue. They seem to know what the issue is and that it does exist.

The issue as it seems is that changing any metadata and then playing a track will create an issue (sometimes you have to leave the Music app before it explodes your album). It seems that this is also related to missing artwork. I've stopped using my Music app completely because it's wrecking my library.

The good news... they know the issue exists now. The bad news... my executive rep can't commit to when the issue will be resolved. Great experience with them after reaching the executive team and in working to identify the issue, but now it's up to me to wait and see if and when it is resolved. So basically kicked to the curb with no commitment from them to follow up with me unless engineering needs more info. IMO it should've never made it through beta testing.

I'm hopeful that the update will happen in the next iOS update, but there has only been one of those in the four months I've owned the newest laptop. I would urge you to contact the executive team and report the issue -- I emailed Mr. Cook (once) and Mr. Federighi (twice) before being contacted.

To see the issue in action, simply change the name of any album (add an extra word to the end to make it easy to find). Play tracks off the newly named album... exit the app.... wait for awhile... and ta-da your stuff should be jacked up when you enter the app again.

As you can guess, with over 12000 album titles, I'm kinda cranky about the mess!

As more people stated: select all albums, right click and press get album artwork. Have patience and most of it will appear.

good luck

I stumbled over TAGR. It’s in the App Store. It does exactly what you want and more.

A good instruction is here: https://youtu.be/HMvHU0E-Dro

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.

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.

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

I tried opening the flie: music-iTunes-iTunesLibray.itl as a new library (Option open iTunes from Finder) and point to the .itl file as a new library) and that got most of it back.

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