album artwork in Catalina Music

Correction: It's the swiping left/right in the Music artwork viewer that seems to be gone. Add 2 pieces of art, and only the last one added is viewable. Delete that one, and then the 1st one is viewable.

I have done thorough testing of trackpad gesture options and found no solution.

I totally agree. I had hundreds of albums with multiple artwork that I have collected for many years, they are now gone. It seems they are devoted to ruining a great application. I cannot believe that they actually test these revisions or even care. They obviously do not read these Forums.

Sadly, the update a couple of days ago has seemingly only made my library even worse. I have contacted executive response team again. Album art is still missing... and when I change meta data (album title, name, anything), it seems to be duplicating tracks and still breaking albums into multiple albums in the view although the location in finder appears correct (except for all of the duplicates that it's now creating). So the fix has actually made things WORSE!!!

Bought a new MBA with Catalina. Was previously on 2011 MBP (had to wait for a keyboard that wasn't crap) and now have the same issue. Close to 1000 albums with <50% having the artwork, much of which I had to scan myself as it's not a common collection.

Thanks a bunch, Apple. Maybe should have just gone with a Dell XPS with Linux. There's always a next time.

I don't look at the artwork, not for ages, well before Catalina was a so much as a glint in Apple's eye. The matching did, it has to be admitted, provide me with an occasional guffaw (ok, the choices are automated), but how can it call it a match when it grabs artwork from an utterly unrelated album for a track it knows (coz it tells me) is "track 5 on a 4 disc various artists album"?

Music is now designed so that, when I search for a track in "Songs", it will play it from the album it is part of and then continue playing the rest of the album, not the Songs playlist. What use is that? I have to manually reinstate all my column choices for each and every playlist.

I discovered a "hidden track" (4 of them) at the end of a Pointer Sisters track so instead of waiting 22 minutes for them to play, I would duplicate the track 4 times, rename them and set the start and end times so they played as independent tracks. The Mac would not accept the new names and determining the start and end times became a "game of chicken" as the running times of the track disappear unless the cursor is held over the progress bar up top. So how do you type in the start time in the dialogue box when your cursor has to be held at the top to know what the figure has to be?

I can only conclude that Apple Corp had previously been nothing less than inundated with masses of requests from its customers to please, please, please, make Music as unworkable as you can while still producing something that can just about plausibly be called "fit for purpose" (i.e. it does actually play music - bravo).

I can't but say how saddened I am to read your last sentence. Because it is a thought I have harboured for a long time. When you go looking for support on "how the blessed thing is supposed to work", you get "Problem? Check out what everyone else thinks who's struggling in the dark before you come hacking on to us about it. (Good chance we won't know anyway.)"

"Wow, that's an interesting development," thought I when seeing the new "Lyrics" option on the tabs. Yes, I must agree that it is interesting- if there were any. The tab will apparently display the lyric of a song - IF you've already fed it in. "There are no lyrics for this song," it says. "Er, yes there are," I reply, "I can actually hear them right now."

Just today, I finally updated to Catalina, worried that with all that I have on the old iTunes library and what has happened in past with disappearing music tracks, I was ready to some on fixing links. But what I was not ready for was not to have the appear on the side, and that now it is trying to find all my artwork to the albums, which has taken me years to tweek, search, input artwork only to have it disappear. Apple should be made accountable for their mishaps. Thousand and thousands of hours people put into maintaining, updating, replacing, searching for missing links, only know to find out it is going to be repeated. This is bull, I have over 772.000 plus and rising audio, (close to 55,000 plus albums) over 500 full length movies, over 1000 music videos, and that artwork which I lived on iTunes, to check for dups, you know right off hand the albums you have, albums missing, etc. Apple has let us down again, and they need to put it back in place, the option for artwork to appear on the "SONGS" tab. Billy B. Los Angeles

I can not understand Apple commercial reasoning for this!

I for one have a lot invested in Apple but now I'm looking for some stable replacement for "Music"

This is like the worst days of Microsoft.

honestmp, just about five minutes ago, I did a restore back to Mojave. I'am done dealing with all the headaches, and countless hours pulling my hair out, finding missing tracks, importing artwork, inputing titles, making it all correct, that over the years with 772,000 plus audio tracks, 55,000 albums plus and rising, and 500 plus full length movies and shows... this is ridiculous that some oddballs would even change the format just to improve their bottom line. Mind boggling. iTunes is a great tool, but not broken apart as it is now in Catalina format. It was taking forever for the their retrieving of the artwork album covers, and did notice that what I uploaded the day before in Mojave, some albums were missing all together even though the album came up on the new iTunes when of course that "!" of death appeared.... Over the years I have input most of the album covers by searching the net and sliding them over. Sure Apple found most when I added albums, but can you imagine all of the years and time taken, I am shaking my head... why why? I do sometimes just sit back and ask myself why am I taking all this time over maintaining this very large library of music that dates back to the early 1900's? It's because I believe for me, music has always been a part of my life? It's because I enjoy all kinds of music. I grew up on country music, my dad was in a band called "Gary Hines and The Country Boys" and we traveled the country music fairground circuits with big stars such Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton/Porter Wagner, Lauretta Lynn, ect. then my grandmother had these old albums that I started to listen to such as, Count Basie, The Mills Brothers, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Doris Day, etc... then later I fell into loving Limousines which I was carting around celebs such MC Hammer, Mi'Chelle, Seduction, Wild Cherry, Rosemary Clooney, Michael Jackson, Tiffany, etc... All this sounds of all the genres just fill me up with all kinds of emotions, joy, you know.... they say music is an international language which I can vouch for that...

Couple years ago I was an android phone user. For Christmas, someone had bought me an Apple Watch, I was so excited that I wanted to pair it up and try it out. At the time I received the watch, you could pair an Apple Watch to an apple iPhone. Damit, wouldn't you know it, I had to purchase an iPhone just to use the Apple Watch.

There is so much wrong where apple is not keeping with their customers. Been an iTunes user since it started. I too have a Mac mini first generation, and I think sometimes it's faster then my 27" Mac. LOL. I also use PC's Both Microsoft and Apple have their faults, but if I had to choose, Apple is becoming the worst of them.

Over the years I have tested out other ways of maintaining a music library. There really is no match for what iTunes (before Catalina) does. Sure, the new version which is probably great for new users, but for us oldies, no way. Tired of all the take aways, screw ups. I lost 9,000 plus songs back when Apple did their music take away which they were never accountable. It was like oh well, move on. Songs disappeared from albums, and whole albums disappeared....

I am back up and running on Mojave again, and have found a somewhat stable program CleanMyMac which kind of is keeping an eye on everything. I am not loosing my library again over some flawed ways of Apple. Hang in there!

It should pretty simple to fix since they know what is wrong.

1. Restore Artwork in the Songs View.
2. Allow Multiple artwork to be stored and accessed for each track like it was before.
3. Allow preferences to choose between allowing Apple to update artwork or not.
4. Fix the problems with multiple libraries. Allow a different Media location for each library like it was before.
5. Embedded artwork should not have to be stored anywhere but with the music file.

Some of us do not want Apple to control what artwork we use.

I did get the second library to work however it stores files in the same folder as the primary library. It is not worth the effort and and constant changes to utilize this option at this time. At least everything I was able to find on Apple indicates that multiple libraries are still supposed to be an option.

I am glad to hear about the Album/Track Problem. I have seen this and thought that it was something I was doing to cause the problem. As I remember this only shows up in Album View. In Songs View the Album appears to be correct and like you said the physical files are not affected. Must be a coding problem, probably something that will be hard to find.

You have infinite patience. I gave up on support. I am now looking for a different application to handle my Music but I am familiar with iTunes and have used it for many years, it will be hard to change.

Thank you, thank you, thank you 🙌

Can't believe it only took a bit over 8 months to find a solution to this problem. And isn't it just fascinating it has to come from the community as Apple is unable to address its own regressions and bugs.

Thanks so much again and kudos for posting this script, VitruviusX.

I figured a very low-tech work-around to the "search / goes to album, not Songs" issue. First though, it raises in me a certain additional doubt which I suppose someone may have a ready answer for and that is: surely a playlist is merely a retrieval system that utilises only certain of the tunes in the Library repository, and does not actually copy the files separately into a new "mini library"? Such as a book lending library, which has one copy of each book, which can be lent out to many readers, albeit only one at a time? It's the "182 GB" of volume the new playlist occupies that is at the root of my doubt. Whatever, what I did was create a new playlist, which I named with the same level of inspiration as led to the new name "Music" - it's called "Everything". I put the entire Song list into another playlist.

So, when I search for a track and Music leads me to it in its album, I right-click and ask it to "Show in playlist - Everything". (there being no option "Show in playlist - Songs"). Which I suppose goes to prove that two wrongs can in fact make a right.