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album artwork in Catalina Music

I updated to Catalina and my Album Artwork in Music is missing. The images are embedded in the file since I can preview the image in Finder (file info). Also, in Music the player shows the image that is saved with the files. I did an Album Artwork search through Music but most Album Artwork can't be found. Any ideas?

Posted on Oct 7, 2019 7:09 PM

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Posted on Oct 9, 2019 4:56 AM

Sorry to hear others are having problems with album art. I know the feeling, as I went through this a few years back with legacy iTunes as I was trying to meticulously clean up metadata in my iTunes music library -- at the time, I had months of problems with iTunes replacing my carefully curated album art, that were compounded by the original iTunes Match process, which Apple Support wasn't able to completely resolve, but I finally figured-out. Anyway, more of my observations:


(The new) Music App appears to be rebuilding an equivalent "Album Artwork subfolder" like we've known forever with iTunes, by re-reading metadata from each track, then depending on Preferences Setting, downloading missing album artwork that it has in Apple Music or the iTunes Store in the cloud. I have yet to find where Music is placing this data as it's not in the same folder with the apparent new Music index file (e.g. user/Music/Music or equivalent) or where your actual media folder is located.


I don't forgive Apple with migration issues anyone is having, but in an effort to help others here, there are a lot of variables that may be the culprit, so in case others want to compare, here's my situation that seemingly made it through the album artwork migration process:

  • I know that nearly every one of my 28K tracks have embedded metadata with JPG or PNG album art as the single Front Cover within the ID3 album art tag. Size varies up to perhaps 1500x1500 or more in some cases, but it's all over the map.
  • Perhaps 85% my 28K tracks are M4A Apple Lossless (manually ripped from my CD collection, with hand curated meta including album art), nearly all the rest are 256K AAC from the iTunes Store, with a couple handfuls of miscellaneous others.
  • I have both iTunes Match and Apple Music enabled with the Music App. (Apple Music expires later this week -- at least for now.)
  • I keep the Preferences Setting to use Apple's Album Art OFF. I found with legacy iTunes it would unexpectedly replace my album art with Apple's version -- which is not what I want to happen; I only want Apple's Art to be used if my metadata for some reason does not include it.


I still suspect people having problems with this:

  1. May not be waiting for the process to complete. It took more than 12 hours for my 28K tracks to be read and process on a 3.6GHz 8-core i9 iMac with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity to my Drobo where the 500GB of music data is located. Eventually all my tracks have album art displaying in the Music App interface once again.
  2. You have a different type or combination of artwork that is/is not imbedded in track meta, along with perhaps a different album art preferences setting that influences this. For album art not showing up, if you have a metadata tag editor (I use Metadatics amongst others), have you looked at the source track to determine if it has imbedded album art and if so, what are it's characteristics? If it does not show up in the metadata, what is your iTunes/Music preferences setting to bring in new album art from the cloud?

It might be useful for others having problems to try and be a bit more specific if they can.


It's likely a red herring and not related to this Catalina Album Artwork thread so I don't want to take us off-track, but just-in-case: After completing the initial migration to the new Music App, I have 123 tracks (of my ~28K) that have "missing files". I have been working to resolve what happened and how to get them back for the past two days. I'm currently in process of having the Music App rebuild everything as a new library by having first signed-out of Music (so there was no iTunes Match/Apple Music in the way), started the migration which as reported elsewhere brought back album art within minutes compared to the first time (so they are being cached somewhere), and I'm now beyond 16 hours of the iTunes Match/Apple Music process checking each and every track against my formerly matched cloud versions. Of interest to me is I caught multiple process threads hitting CPU during this time, giving me the impression the Album Artwork build is done in parallel with the Cloud Matching process -- and I suspect I may have screwed things up the first time when I tried to "consolidate" to a new location outside the old iTunes Media folder while the Match process was going on. IDK, but time will tell. Again, this non-album-art anomaly is likely a red herring and off-topic for this thread.


Good luck to everyone

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Question marked as Best reply

Oct 9, 2019 4:56 AM in response to WDW1Fanatic

Sorry to hear others are having problems with album art. I know the feeling, as I went through this a few years back with legacy iTunes as I was trying to meticulously clean up metadata in my iTunes music library -- at the time, I had months of problems with iTunes replacing my carefully curated album art, that were compounded by the original iTunes Match process, which Apple Support wasn't able to completely resolve, but I finally figured-out. Anyway, more of my observations:


(The new) Music App appears to be rebuilding an equivalent "Album Artwork subfolder" like we've known forever with iTunes, by re-reading metadata from each track, then depending on Preferences Setting, downloading missing album artwork that it has in Apple Music or the iTunes Store in the cloud. I have yet to find where Music is placing this data as it's not in the same folder with the apparent new Music index file (e.g. user/Music/Music or equivalent) or where your actual media folder is located.


I don't forgive Apple with migration issues anyone is having, but in an effort to help others here, there are a lot of variables that may be the culprit, so in case others want to compare, here's my situation that seemingly made it through the album artwork migration process:

  • I know that nearly every one of my 28K tracks have embedded metadata with JPG or PNG album art as the single Front Cover within the ID3 album art tag. Size varies up to perhaps 1500x1500 or more in some cases, but it's all over the map.
  • Perhaps 85% my 28K tracks are M4A Apple Lossless (manually ripped from my CD collection, with hand curated meta including album art), nearly all the rest are 256K AAC from the iTunes Store, with a couple handfuls of miscellaneous others.
  • I have both iTunes Match and Apple Music enabled with the Music App. (Apple Music expires later this week -- at least for now.)
  • I keep the Preferences Setting to use Apple's Album Art OFF. I found with legacy iTunes it would unexpectedly replace my album art with Apple's version -- which is not what I want to happen; I only want Apple's Art to be used if my metadata for some reason does not include it.


I still suspect people having problems with this:

  1. May not be waiting for the process to complete. It took more than 12 hours for my 28K tracks to be read and process on a 3.6GHz 8-core i9 iMac with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity to my Drobo where the 500GB of music data is located. Eventually all my tracks have album art displaying in the Music App interface once again.
  2. You have a different type or combination of artwork that is/is not imbedded in track meta, along with perhaps a different album art preferences setting that influences this. For album art not showing up, if you have a metadata tag editor (I use Metadatics amongst others), have you looked at the source track to determine if it has imbedded album art and if so, what are it's characteristics? If it does not show up in the metadata, what is your iTunes/Music preferences setting to bring in new album art from the cloud?

It might be useful for others having problems to try and be a bit more specific if they can.


It's likely a red herring and not related to this Catalina Album Artwork thread so I don't want to take us off-track, but just-in-case: After completing the initial migration to the new Music App, I have 123 tracks (of my ~28K) that have "missing files". I have been working to resolve what happened and how to get them back for the past two days. I'm currently in process of having the Music App rebuild everything as a new library by having first signed-out of Music (so there was no iTunes Match/Apple Music in the way), started the migration which as reported elsewhere brought back album art within minutes compared to the first time (so they are being cached somewhere), and I'm now beyond 16 hours of the iTunes Match/Apple Music process checking each and every track against my formerly matched cloud versions. Of interest to me is I caught multiple process threads hitting CPU during this time, giving me the impression the Album Artwork build is done in parallel with the Cloud Matching process -- and I suspect I may have screwed things up the first time when I tried to "consolidate" to a new location outside the old iTunes Media folder while the Match process was going on. IDK, but time will tell. Again, this non-album-art anomaly is likely a red herring and off-topic for this thread.


Good luck to everyone

Oct 21, 2019 12:17 PM in response to FWissman

Apple almost never responds here, and I never expect they will. This is primarily a user-to-user forum. Apple moderators do occasionally intervene for off-topic, offensive, etc postings, but it’s not a direct support or feedback route I use. When I want to ensure I get directly to Apple direct, I use:

Oct 8, 2019 2:06 PM in response to WDW1Fanatic

Having the same issue - and it's frustrating given the volume of music I have. But I have also noticed that each time I close/re-open "Music" (hope some overpaid Apple PhD gets credit for coming up with that name) all the settings are back to default. Do we presume that this is another glitch that will be fixed in a later update or will we forever have to live with the overwhelming genius of the Apple developers who clearly know better than we do?

Oct 13, 2019 10:55 AM in response to NIKMS

I also updated to Catalina, with a clean install and rebuilt my music library, all the artwork, (independently sourced- not from Apple), initially was there and has been until today, now no artwork displays in album view. If I use 'Get Info' it is all there, the fault just seems to be in album view. The whole Music app seems to be a disaster compared to iTunes. iTunes did what we all expected from Apple- it just worked! Apple seem to be determined to withdraw useful features such as column browser to make everything look like a mobile app with limited usability. I have a large music collection and it's becoming more difficult to manage using Music- please give us back useable useful apps!

Oct 17, 2019 5:30 AM in response to NIKMS

I have the same problem as well on Catalina. Every time Apple updates their OS they screw up music. Some of us take significant time and effort to keep our music in order with artwork, meta tags, etc. Every time Apple does a major OS update they screw it up and break what we have done. I am so done with Apple's clear lack of competence with respect to their users and their core applications. Does anyone know of a good iTunes/Music (laughable) replacement that allows you to see album artwork and manage it and other meta data thru the app? I've looked at MediaTrans and iMazing but neither allow you to manage artwork and other song info (volume, equalization, lyrics, etc.). Your beta program really sucks if no one you have in it tests these things.

Oct 14, 2019 4:20 AM in response to NIKMS

There are a few other threads discussing this same issue, it would be great if Apple could consolidate them to make the cumulative discussion more effective.


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250711429


I have found that some of my music files no longer have the artwork attached, in other words finding the file in Finder in Mojave shows the artwork, and in Catalina it does not. So I suspect there is a larger bug than just re-indexing the cover art and asking people to use the Get Album Artwork functionality.


Is there any way to be notified when apple fixes this? Many people are just reverting back to Mojave, but it would be nice to know if they fix the bugs eventually so we can progress into Catalina, (not having use of reminders etc. in Mojave anymore is terrible).

Dec 11, 2019 3:39 PM in response to BitPerfectRichard

Unsure if it will help others still having troubles, but the Catalina 10.15.2 update that came out yesterday includes mention of 3 items for Music, including “Resolves an issue that may prevent album artwork from appearing“. May be worth a try. https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2025?locale=en_US


Good luck to all still having problems with this!

May 7, 2020 12:22 PM in response to inAjet

Lots of good discussion here, and it's been useful to know that many others are having issues along these lines. I have reported multiple issues related to artwork and general Music usability using Apple's feedback submission form. However, the submission page has not been updated for Music under Catalina, leaving reporting as an iTunes problem the only option. I keep checking back every so often to see if they add a reporting line for Music. I definitely recommend these issues also get reported via the product feedback page, since Apple has a history of not monitoring these discussion forums closely (if at all).

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

Aug 25, 2020 12:22 PM in response to WDW1Fanatic

WDW1Fanatic — You seemed to be well-versed in all things iTunes / Apple Music woes (since the Catalina iOS "upgrade".) Was wondering if you could please check out my issues on this thread, as I just started experiences issues with song / album art not showing up in playlists (regarding the last few albums I've ripped from CD to my iTunes.)


Literally didn't have this problem at all last week—but over the past 72 hours, any new music added is not showing the artwork in playlists (or when syncing that new music to my iPhone.)


Maddening. Thank you.


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251721351?login=true


Oct 11, 2019 5:40 PM in response to Tom Roehl

@Tom R, if you try restarting the Music App, does it pick up again building artwork? Mine did, and by not touching the app for several hours, it finally completed with 100% of the art in place. If you just keep crashing, it’s time to call Apple Support. Good Luck.


===


FWIW to close-out my saga started above, I finally got Music and TV (along with Audiobooks and Podcasts) to complete their migration. After the initial Music migration failure, I ended-up letting TV complete by itself, then started Music migration from scratch as a new library based on my old iTunes library. That decision caused album art to be rebuilt, as well as the matching process to be done from scratch against what was previously loaded in my iCloud Music library. Once both of those tasks were done, I consolidated the libraries on each app one-by-one for good measure. Having started this journey on Monday, everything is finally done now with just a few hiccups:

  • TV has a single movie which I previously purchased from iTunes that refuses to show album art — it’s a black blob, opposed to all other movies, TV shows and home movies. I may well try to download it again to see if that resolves the problem — IDK if it’s that important to me right now. ;)
  • TV does not consolidate (aka move) old .ite files that iTunes could use — which are the legacy “Extras” some older downloaded movies had as a separate file from the movie itself and were only executable on macOS, not ATV or other more modern devices. I had maybe 20-30 of these and rather than get more frustrated trying to figure out what to do about it, just deleted them, and I’ll move on.
  • As mentioned above, I ended-up with around 130 Music tracks that had problems after migration and consolidation — tracks that were not found (or as I found later, wouldn’t match for some weird reason), or showed as duplicate songs where both pointed to the same physical file. FWIW, I verified I had zero issues like these prior to Catalina using my old manual methods and some Doug Scripts I used to have.
    • I went through the failing songs one-by-one and found that if I tried to play most of the tracks not found (with the exclamation mark), they would be located in my previously uploaded music library — from there the download icon appeared, which I clicked, and I was golden having once again for that track. The possible gotcha here would be if you had higher bit rate or lossless original files on your disk, you’d only get max 256 from the cloud version — so, beware.
    • Some supposedly duplicate tracks took more work — I checked both as to where they were saying the physical file was located, and found most were pointing to the same file. I deleted one using right-click in Music, but when the prompt appeared, I selected “Keep File”. That got rid of the dupe track pointer and I was good to go again.
    • A handful of tracks were somehow lost along the way — pointers to non-existent files nowhere on my disk. I found the source file on the backup I had made before Catalina installation, copied each one to the “Add to Music” folder, deleted the failing track, and was good to go with the newly-added tracks once again. Odd. I can’t explain what happened with those...


Good luck to everyone. This is and has been a painful migration. I’m just praying that nothing happens now to my 9TB of migrated data while I back it up over the next couple of days — it takes a very long time even across two Thunderbolt 3 Drobo’s doing it from scratch when directory structures have changed. ;)

Dec 24, 2019 5:22 PM in response to florent176

So I'm finally okay with my situation. I deleted the new Music library from ~/Music/Music

Then noticed that in ~/Music/iTunes, my original iTunes library files from before the upgrade are still present.


After deleting the Music library, I opened up the Music app while holding down the Option key to get the 'Choose Music Library' screen and chose the old iTunes library. It reprocessed everything, and MOST of the album artwork started to populate.


There was still a fair bit missing, so I deleted the Music library again, restored the latest iTunes Library from before the Catalina upgrade, and tried it again. This time, it loaded about half of the artwork. So I deleted and tried again, and then it loaded almost no artwork at all!


I rebooted, deleted the Music library one more time, and left the iTunes folder as it was before I restored any backups. So it was now in the exact state it would have been after the upgrade. I opened music holding Option, picked the iTunes library, and let it process. Once again, MOST of the artwork was there. It seems to me like most of what was missing was artwork I had previously had iTunes fetch from the store. I then spent a few hours fixing the small percentage that was still missing, but at least now it was manageable. Before, it would have taken me more time than I practically have in order to fix everything.


Another tip: You can find a most (at least in my case) of the old iTunes album artwork in ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork but it will not be in a format you can use. I ran this folder through File Juicer by Echo One, and it extracted all the covers in JPG and PNG format. You can run the folder through the free version just to see if this will help you and purchase it if you think it will. (Not affiliated with them in any way, just REALLY helped me to save the rarer artwork that I had trouble finding online.)

Keep in mind, any artwork you recover in this manner will have a random filename and you will need to match it back to the album just by looking for it visually.




So anyway, my recommendation, based purely on my experience with this whole thing:


    1. Rename ~/Music/Music to ~/Music/Music.bak
    2. Reboot
    3. Open Music while holding down the Option key
    4. Pick 'Choose Library' and browse to your original iTunes library in ~/Music/iTunes or whatever alternate location you may have placed it in
    5. It will re-convert your iTunes library to a Music library, and should reprocess all of the artwork. Don't close Music until this is finished, as indicated in the bottom left corner of the application.
    6. Hopefully at this point you will have most of your artwork back without the need to restore any backups of your entire music library or your entire system.


Following steps are optional, but may be helpful in case you are still missing a great deal of artwork after this:

    1. Download File Juicer by Echo One
    2. Drag the entire ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork folder over File Juicer. It will place a folder on your desktop with all of the artwork images
    3. Visually look through the folder and find the artwork you are needing. Copy/paste or drag/drop this back into your album in the Music app.

Jan 28, 2020 11:47 AM in response to NIKMS

It will never work correctly because now the library is not anymore self-consistent. Unfortunately, Apple wants put the artworks in the user home library (namely in a container: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent) and therefore, as long as this library is not regenerated, the artworks do no appear, even if each single music file has it embedded!


In this way:

  • the library in not anymore self consistent when moved or an external disk or shared by more users on the same Mac.
  • there is a wasting of space in the user home directory


This solution seems to be technically a nonsense and prone of bugs. The only reason I see is forcing users to pass through appleID and I Cloud since nothing works anymore without it.

Basically is just a killing of reasons to use a Mac.

Feb 13, 2020 5:32 PM in response to NIKMS

*** NOTE: If you don't want to read this whole post, then just skip down to the [* FIX *] section. ***


I have the same problem - and I may have discovered what is going on and how to fix it. Before Catalina, all of my songs had embedded (thumbnail) Artwork AND downloaded (full size) Artwork. After upgrading to Catalina, the situation is as follows:


  1. All of the songs still contain embedded Artwork (i.e. in Artist view or Album view, you will see the thumbnail images).
  2. Initially, about 90% of the songs had not downloaded associated full size Artwork (i.e. Opening the Music app, right-clicking on a song, choosing "get info", and then clicking on the "Artwork" tab shows a blank page.) For about 10% of my songs, the "Artwork" tab correctly shows artwork for the song in question.
  3. For any newly purchased song, both the song and its associated artwork are immediately downloaded.
  4. For any song that is newly added to my library (via Apple Music subscription), both the song and its associated artwork are immediately downloaded.
  5. Each day that I open the Apple Music app, the Apple Music app will show "processing album artwork" in the lower left-hand corner of the app. This "processing" will usually run for a few minutes. If I quit the Apple Music app and then immediately reopen it (or if I reopen it after waiting only a few minutes), then it will not show "processing album artwork". However, if I quit the Apple Music app, wait for several hours (or wait until the next day), and then reopen it, then it will again show "processing album artwork".


If I go to the folder where the new Apple Music app stores downloaded Album Artwork, namely:


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


and I sort the folder by date modified, then I can see that for each day that I opened the Apple Music app there are anywhere between 20 and 100 files downloaded. The most common number of files downloaded on a given day are 20, 60, and 100. I can tell that these files were automatically bulk-downloaded by the Apple Music App because all of the downloaded files (on a given day) have nearly identical timestamps. Whereas, files that were downloaded because I newly added them to my library have widely-spaced timestamps (because I'm a slow human rather than a robot - I think!).


[* FIX *] So, the "fix" appears to be to open the Apple Music app once per day and let the "processing album artwork" function run. After the "processing" finishes (or when you are done listening to music) be sure to fully quit the Apple Music app and then don't open it again for at least several hours or until the next day. Apparently, each day it will download an additional 20 - 100 files and eventually your Artwork will be complete. Note: Once the "processing album artwork" finishes, going to File > Library > "Get Album Artwork" will not actually do anything - apparently, the Apple Music app will only process so many files per day.


I know this isn't the answer that everyone (including me) wants - because it would be much nicer for the Artwork to just continuously download until its done - but, I think this may be the reality of the way it works...presumably to keep from overwhelming Apple's servers. BTW: some people's artwork seems to migrate over all at once during the iTunes to Apple Music app migration process, and I think that's the way it's supposed to work if nothing goes wrong during the migration (in this case it probably just copies the files from the old folder to the new folder rather than re-downloading all the files), but if something caused your migration to go wrong (like mine), then the above process seems to be the way that it sort of eventually repairs itself.

album artwork in Catalina Music

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