Album art in Music for Catalina

It took me the best part of 16 hours to manually go through each album that was missing its cover art, 16 hours a apple. A day off work wasted doing something I had already done previously. And to add insult to injury the ‘get album artwork’ didn’t work for a majority of music. This is a serious error on Apples part and should not have happened.

Oh and then not to mention the erratic iPhone synching. Not keen on the new interface as there doesn’t appear to be anywhere that tells you how many songs were synced to your device so you could check against to make sure all tracks had been synchronised. This is really hand for those of us with large music library's. Mine is over 3700 albums, approx 55K songs.

I found that every-time I clicked play, the artwork would show up for that song, after 3 songs, i had 3 artworks showing. It is the same even after restarting the app. I will wait as I do not intend to go down the song list clicking play on every track one-by-one...

I have a 2014 Macbook Air and a 2019 iMac. The iMac is missing some artwork for music albums and half the artwork for movies. The Air has all the art for everything. The missing artwork problem appears to have a hardware connection of some sort.

My iTunes library is big (2173 albums) and all of them had album covers until my Mac was upgraded to Catalina.

All covers for albums added in 2019 disappeared. Weirdly many albums added/released in 2017 lost their covers too.

Artwork is visible in finder and when the song is played. Status of missing album arts is the same as three days ago, nothing changed.

How long we need to wait until this bug will be fixed? ;___;

As a side note to people wanting to expedite the process of finding music without album art. Remember that you can make a smart playlist:

Album Artwork -> is false

I will wait until the issue is fixed and then transition to Catalina at that time given the loss of details in my actual files.

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.

I don't have an answer for you but I'm experiencing the same problems and it's driving me crazy. No art work, the entire system crashes. Have you noticed that certain ways of searching no longer exist? For example you cannot search in "songs" at all and the two windows that showed "genres" and " artists" no longer exist. This is awful. Just as I've been writing "music" has crashed again.

OK, the next morning after I installed Catalina (and posted here) my artwork appeared. I am noticing that the artwork disappears when I scroll and slowly reappears after I stop scrolling. I am on a older laptop (Mid 2012 MacBook Pro) and I'm considering an upgrade. However, I'd like to retain this laptop for ripping CDs as it has the built-in CD drive which is faster than my external one.

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...

Man Apple really screwed this up. I have about 5000 albums, and it has spent the last 2 days killing my computer by ramping up the CPU usage and the memory. It slowly loads artwork. The all of a sudden it stopped. The artwork is there but not shown for some albums, because I can see it in the mini player. This is truly painful, especially since I have spent the last 10 years growing a meticulously maintained set of music. Now it looks like I will have to rebuild it.

My artwork all loaded fine but I've found now that if I delete or edit artwork on some tracks the time shows an additional 16 seconds (approx). The track isn't actually any longer and plays for the original time length but shows in the time column as a new, longer time.

Definitely some problem with the tagging now! 🤨

That's all well in good if the only thing you have on your computer is top 40 tracks, but I have tons of albums that Itunes doesn't even sell that were ripped from vinyl. Itunes does not have the artwork for those. Yes, my artwork was embedded, and now Apple Music just shows a blank cover. When you play the songs, the artwork shows in the mini player, so it is there still embedded. Apple did not think this all the way through before releasing this application. My computer sat for days "loading artwork" and during that time it was unusable since Music was using 95% CPU and eating all of the memory. It utilized so much memory that my iMac kernel panicked twice and shutdown. Some album art also got changed to some version that Apple has in their database, which is incorrect. The Blues Brothers Movie Soundtrack shows a pair of sunglasses, not John Belushi and Dan Akroyd sitting on the hood of their cop car. This is because Apple has many holes in their music database. Now we are really paying for that. After loading forever, the process just quit, and now nothing is happening, leaving hundreds of unresolved files. Is there any way to force it to start the process again.? That way I at least will not have to find hundreds of album covers.

I have found that several of the tracks on albums, possibly all of my 53K's worth of songs have an extra 16/17 seconds worth of song at the end!!!!!! SO for example on Sgt Pepper the penultimate track should be 1:21 but it cuts out and plays the last 17 seconds over again. Very disconcerting to say the least!!! This has to be a bug, shoddy coding or whatever Apple wants to pass it off as!! Interesting thing is the same track plays normally on my phone, so synching music isn't being affected, thank god. So how do we get Apple to sort this out FAST!!!

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'm using a 2018 Mac Mini i5 version 8gb ram. I have about 1.4tb of music. Mostly alac converted files and 50 percent itunes purchased Music. I also have 300gb of Music Videos.

I stupidly upgraded to Catalina and found the application so slow, that I gave up. If I tried to play music while it scanned and downloaded artwork as it updated tracks. My tracks started not to been found.

The program can't even update apples' own music forget my custom art work.

I also recently bought a Samsung S10+ (1tb) loaded my Itunes in to power amp. The program scanned and downloaded missing art. 99 percent of artwork was there with no problems. A mobile phone app is more efficient than my Mac.

I've decide to use my Itunes on my Macbook Pro 2012 running Mojave until they fix this.