New 'Music' app using 30 GB of memory and increasing

It did that for me and got up to about 22GB. It was getting the album art. I restarted the app and it started lower and started getting the rest of the art. Once that was done, I restarted the app again and the memory usage is now steady around 600MB.

Seems very excessive to use that much memory to get album art. I have over 40GB of music, but still...

I have this problem too, it's definitely a fault in Catalina Music, or so. I did leave it running overnight but no solution. Its eating up all my memory starting with a kind of normal usage, but still no album art, just a few. I know this for sure because Audirvana is working perfectly with showing all the album art.

I have this problem too, it's definitely a fault in Catalina Music, or so. I did leave it running overnight but no solution. Its eating up all my memory starting with a kind of normal usage, but still no album art, just a few. I know this for sure because Audirvana is working perfectly with showing all the album art.

I have this problem too, it's definitely a fault in Catalina Music, or so. I did leave it running overnight but no solution. Its eating up all my memory starting with a kind of normal usage, but still no album art, just a few. I know this for sure because Audirvana is working perfectly with showing all the album art.

I finished installing Catalina around 1 a.m. then went to bed. When I got up, my computer had alerts about needing to shut down all apps because my iMac (with 64 GB of RAM and 900 GB of available storage) had run out of system memory.

All my apps were still up, although the Music app was had quit and lost all its configuration. The ‘runtime’ command showed that my computer had not rebooted since the install, so I figured Music must have crashed, and that everything had somehow returned to normal. I let Music run for a while, reconfigured/resized it, allowed album art to re-download, then relaunched it.

I returned home this evening and my computer was using up all 64 GB of RAM with 70 GB of swapfile usage, all of it going to the Music app. The app was also constantly using up 150% CPU and causing stutters throughout the system. Every once in a while, album art was flickering in and out of my playlists, and the activity window was showing “Loading artwork…” over and over.

Shutting down the Music app instantly released 120+ GB of memory. But then all the artwork is gone once again.

There is something seriously wrong with the way the Music app is dealing with album artwork. It might be a conflict with artwork downloaded in iTunes on earlier versions of macOS...

I hope so. Mine keeps losing all album art on every relaunch, causing Time Machine to backup hundreds of GB over and over. Memory consumption stays around 4 GB for a little while after opening, but then doubles every so often. It was sitting at 40 GB of swapfile after a few hours just now. This is also causing premature wear-and-tear on SSDs.

I'm having the same problem and it has not improved since updating to Catalina. It is still "loading artwork" despite being on all day while I was at work. The computer has been restarted a couple times to see if that would help and it doesn't. Computer is constantly running at max RAM memory. It actually is struggling to type out this post its lagging so bad from the RAM hog that Music has become. This problem is not "Solved".

Yeah, that’s what I’ll have to do. I might just have to call AppleCare and see if they have any useful suggestions. The weird thing is my music files all show their album art in the Finder; Music just can’t seem to read/update them. I saw an Album Art folder in one of the Library sub-folders, but it was empty. I wonder if that’s related to these issues.

In my situation the memory eating is normalized now, but not all the album art is downloaded from my NAS and I can't delete the art. So, still not good and waiting for an update. I really don't understand why they didn't handle this in any beta release!

After struggling with the same thing since the update I finally broke down and chatted with Apple Support. After troubleshooting a few things they had me reinstall Catalina. At this point that seems to have worked perfectly. I no longer have any issue running the Music app. The loop of "loading artwork" has been nonexistent and my Ram use with the Music app is back to normal.

They had me start from the recovery system (hold command +R while turning on). It gives four options (i can't remember them all but one is start a clean reinstall of OS). I did that and it is still running smoothly almost 24 hours later.

Apparently, it’s also causing Time Machine to backup 50 GB of data every time I relaunch Music, because all my music gets updated with new artwork each time…