Album art in Music for Catalina

In the past, and recently with Catalina, when I select File > Library > Get album Artwork, after searching for the artwork, I get a message telling me artwork couldn’t be found for ‘x’ amount of albums and it lists them. You can save that list. Try selecting your entire library before Getting Artwork.

As a side note, when I upgraded to Catalina from Mojave, Music appears to be completely unaffected. It was only after a clean install that my Artwork wasn’t showing. Catalina didn’t strip it, it just doesn’t show it. It took me several hours, but I was able to restore my entire library using my method above. To get all the artwork to appear on my iPhone, I had to delete Music from the phone, reinstall it and do a backup, then a sync. It took about an hour, but now all artwork is showing on my phone as well.

OMG. I did. and it also contains albums WITH album artwork. And I am pretty sure this is some of the old artwork I made myself......

the story continues :-)

I considered going back to Mojave, but then I am stuck with reminders which do not sync with my iPhone...

Let's all cheer out: Apple, Apple, Apple forever.

What I do NOT have is excessive CPU usage. it is about 35%

Alternative, for both iTunes/Music and iPhone app, there are plenty. Just google it. (I don’t have any recommendations). However, to have a seamless integration between all Apple devices, I think there may not be one out there. I use iTunes Match and it really save a lot of disc space in all my Apple devices. This tight me back to Apple software.

I lost a lot of cover art for albums I ripped from real CDs that I own. When they were ripped, iTunes could not locate cover art for them, and I had to laboriously scan in the covers (laborious because the CDs are stored in very dense loose-leaf collections ring-binders in the house, but I keep the jackets in deep storage).

I'm pretty depressed that iTunes/Music would opt to delete existing cover art when it itself had found no replacement. "Do no harm" always seems to be the better paradigm.

I've done a little searching around but I have never invested any time in how iTunes/Music stores its data, and I have tripped over no obvious subdirectory of TIFFs or JPGs of previous cover art.

Time Machine is not an option -- since I don't have the Music internals to explain how this happened, I'd be jumping into the flames to just bulk-restore my old library in place. I'm almost certain that would make things worse.

Also strange: I built the smart playlist of Album Artwork:False . I randomly sampled it, asking Music to show me some of the affected albums with "Show Album in iTune Store".

Some of the albums are in the store with artwork, yet "Get Album Artwork" refuses to bring it down. In every case (so far), it's a CD I bought at a brick and mortar store - not iTunes. That I own the real, physical thing does not entitle me to get the album artwork from Apple. One can imagine all the legal mumbo-jumbo that might make this the case.

Are we seeing Apple strong-arming us all into subscribing to Music? Paying to enjoy stuff we already owned...?

Even so, I think there's some liability incurred if they wipe the album artwork I had already gathered manually.

Maybe if there's some free trial for Music, I can join, get my artwork, then not renew.

Rather than trying to rectify this situation for each of my albums, I'm hoping that they will approach this as a serious bug and resolve it so I can move forward from Mojave to Catalina on my main machine without this corruption of my library. I would suggest not transitioning to Catalina and the new Music app for anyone who has a decent sized personal library of music ripped from CD, or not purchased from iTunes.

Giving apple the benefit of the doubt that they will take this bug seriously and attempt resolution, I recommend that people step back to Mojave if they have a viable backup from before. I'm not sure how that is done.., but that would be my course of action if I had not moved to Catalina on a test machine.

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.

Thanks for that. I'm not a techie and i'm sitting on 1200 albums on Mojave 10.14.6. I stupidly upgraded to Catalina but fortunately with the help of Time Machine and a hard drive back up reverted back to Mojave. I had a look at Dougscript but wasn't sure which version to use. There's a lot of headings there that are very similar. Can you help? Thanks in advance

The point is that no one should have to go through complex and time-consuming machinations to fix the mistakes Apple has made with this extremely disappointing upgrade to its operating system. Apple needs to retool at source and send a fix. But it's been nearly a week since Catalina dropped, and so far nothing, which seems ominous.

This is my issue also. I have a combination of 5000 purchased, matched, and uploaded rips and I have meticulously curated the artwork on all of these these, meaning I have customized artwork on most, but have also left the artwork alone on purchased items if it is correct. When I open the new Music App in Catalina, about 90% of the artwork is missing from each type (purchased, ripped and uploaded, matched... ones that I have customized, ones I have left alone... makes no difference). When I wait several minutes almost all of the artwork finally appears. Then after more time it randomly disappears, then reappears after more time, then disappears, etc. If I close the app and then reopen, it starts out as missing, but then reappears, disappears, reappears, etc. I don't think this has anything to with whether the artwork is "embedded" or not. Also I have stopped using the "Automatically Update Artwork" in preferences, or the "Get Album Artwork" by right clicking on a Song/Album many years ago because all too frequently it gets the wrong artwork (i.e. many times old iTunes would download artwork from a greatest hits album for a song, rather than get artwork from the original album that I ripped it from, etc.), so I have not turned that on in the new Music app.

I believe you if you had embedded artwork, it is still there. You can verify by Right-Clicking > Get Info > Artwork. If you see the artwork, it's there, just not displayed. I have all my artwork displayed now, all the time, on all my devices. It took me several hours, but I have zero issues now using the method I outlined above to restore the artwork. One note: a small % of albums needed to be done twice for the artwork to appear, but it did work on every one of my 1500+ albums.

Since the artwork is there, Apple will probably have a fix; just be patient. If not, my method should restore your library; just takes time. I believe this is just some sort of tagging issues. To be safe, I've disabled Automatic Artwork Updating...

The other issue some people are mentioning: extra time on some songs is a little different. I don't know how long most of my songs are, so I have no idea if some show more time, but I can confirm some of my songs 'replay' the last 10 seconds or so before going to the next song. Hopefully this will be addressed in an update as well.

Don't panic. I don't believe any embedded artwork has been stripped; it's just not being displayed. To be safe, backup your library now in case an update does strip it...

I've found a solution for this issue. Apple is using a new library format ".musiclibrary", you can find it in the new Music folder named "Music Library.musiclibrary". This problem probably arises because Music ****** up when transferring the old music library to its secret new little library. You can ask it to rebuild the library by quit Music and option-click it to start without a library, then instruct it to load the old iTunes library under iTunes folder named "iTunes Library.itl". Then Music asks for a location to store the new library, which doesn't matter as you can move it later and Music recognizes it. Then Music should start loading artworks.

THIS IS THE SOLUTION!

Apple is using a new library format ".musiclibrary", you can find it in the new Music folder named "Music Library.musiclibrary". You can ask it to rebuild the library by ,quit Music, after press option key + click to start without a library. Then select Choose Library and select from iTunes folder the file named "iTunes Library.itl". Then Music asks for a location to store the new library, which will be in Music/music. Then Music should start loading artworks (just allow some time depending on the size of library).

All the best!

Hope for better OS updates from apple next time!

I feel like apple start to go down...

UPDATE FOR IOS 13!

If you sync an ios 13 device with your mac will have the same problem. After you solved the problem on the mac just simply delete al the music from the phone, sync the phone with no music and in the and sync the phone again with the music you want on it.

All the best!

Hello,

Same issue, I've lost over 1/3 of album artwork from CD's I ripped into iTunes YEARS ago. Before I spend hundreds of hours replacing album artwork for library over 90 GB, can this be recovered from a Time Machine backup prior to Catalina? If so, please provide idiot proof instructions please. I've already tried "get album artwork" in iMusic a couple of times no success. Some of the artwork that did get loaded with iMusic isn't correct. Same album name but entirely different artist, extremely weird.

One other thing I noticed, on my MacBook Pro my iTunes (OS Mojave with all updates) was about 4 GB larger than my iMac iMusic OS Catalina. Did a quick search, all my movies, TV shows, Podcasts, were present. Is there a way to recover entire iTunes library into iMusic? Again, idiot proof instructions would help. I'm not sure what exactly was missing in that 4 GB. I can't image there would be 4 GB difference between the two app's alone.

Any assistance on this issue is much appreciated.