Album art in Music for Catalina

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.

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.

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 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

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.

It's early February, and Catalina 10.15.3 is out, and this album artwork thing has no official fix from Apple yet? I too am missing my album artwork for many albums. Anyways, I did a little research.

It seems that album "artwork" is stored way way off in a different directory than where the "Music" folder (and all your actual songs/tracks are actually stored).

To see where the album JPEG files are I had to track it down to:

Library / Containers / com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent / Data / Documents / artwork

To get to Library, this is the "hidden Library", you can see it from the Finder, you click Option + MenuBar "Go", drop down to Library, and then dig down from there, etc.

Once you navigate to the folder called "artwork", you see bazillions of JPG image files, those are our missing artwork. The problem is.... we know the images are there! But MacOS Catalina is too stupid to have the Music app recognize the location of this folder?

This is a root of the problem. I have located in detail where the artwork images (they are JPEG files) are physically located in the Mac hard drive. If we can get Apple to realize and fix this, then maybe a future Catalina update/patch will correctly point to the proper "artwork folder" without most of us having to manually fix things.

The issue is that Catalina (at least up to 10.15.6), both in Finder and in Music, has completely lost the ability to respectively show and embed album artwork in AIFF files... which is pretty much exactly what the AIFF format is there for - it's a container format bundling a WAV file in with metadata to give us our lossless music source data with album covers, artist names, album names, track titles etc. in tags, so that they're embedded with it and thus follow the file everywhere you copy it.

Catalina has somehow destroyed the artwork tag for AIFF files. Forget about Doug's scripts, those AIFF files you have been meticulously curating for many years like me, the embedded album artwork is GONE!

I could almost write a book on the many bugs and weird scenarios I have faced alone in this broken, messed up iTunes. Apple, hang your heads in shame. A lot of these issues have been here for around a year since beta, issues that are damaging peoples' data all over the world. Are you trying to make us abandon AIFF to use your proprietary ALAC? Make us loose our data with the haphazard positioning of the "Remove Downloads" option presented as immediately hovering above the cursor on every single right-click of any music item/album/playlist, where people are accidentally removing chunks of, or in some cases ALL their source libraries... bypassing recycle bin, gone forever with no warning if you right-click then accidentally click the top option. All of this CANNOT be "accidentally on purpose" and left in this state! This is Apple waging war on private music collectors and trying dirty tricks to suck people into subscribing to its streaming service.

After much exploration of these issues and some consideration, I really believe all of this is all agenda-driven and we will not be seeing these things fixed as for Apple, they are not bugs, but instead quirks and features to get THEM what THEY want.

There are multiple versions of this script. If you use an old link, you might end up installing a script that is not compatible with your current OS version. These scripts will run but won't bring a solution. Please check if you're running a script that is compatible.

When I first run the script, I run it overnight and a huge portion of the missing artwork had been recovered. After, I run the script on individual albums still missing artwork. Again, album artwork had been added. Took me multiple attempts but only a number of 80/90 albums out of 1500+ albums required adding artwork without using the script. Still working on that though. It shouldn't be necessary....

Try selecting albums without artwork, right-click, and select Get Album Artwork.

tt2

Just build yourself a smart playlist where the album artwork condition is false. Then view that smart list as albums.