album artwork in Catalina Music

First thing I noticed were many new exclamation points indicating missing tracks. These apparently were moved to Users/Shared/Relocated Items as they had been “in a location that is now incompatible with macOS security settings.” Music seemed to find them when I attempted to play these tracks.

Disclosure 1: Many of my iTunes tracks have resided in various Unix linked directories since I ran out of local hard drive space back around version 5. They are still strewn about more that I like. I never could seem to get then all into Music/iTunes/iTunes/ Media/Music, many of them preferring to remain in Music/iTunes/iTunes Music.

Next were my chosen column headers which I mostly resurrected.

And finally there was the missing artwork and Music’s incessant “loading artwork” and memory issues.

Disclosure 2: I have 22,880 albums and many didn’t have artwork previously (e.g., SXSW 2006 Showcasing Artist).

The artwork has indeed been loading to /Users/<my-name>/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork, but at a snail’s pace. Sometime shortly after the foolish click on the Catalina upgrade I had 7,640 items in that artwork folder. After stopping and starting Music intermittently over the past few weeks, that folder has 7,707 items (sizes varying from 406 bytes to 15.5 MB.) I would daresay Music has been open for somewhere nearing a hundred hours during that time. Sleep may have overcome the process….

That memory issue is the kicker since Music occasionally crashes and, I assume, loses the work it was performing. In Activity Monitor, choose View->Inspect Process and select Open Files and Ports shows a bunch of .itc files located in /Users/<my-name>/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork/Download/. According to https://fileinfo.com/extension/itc these files were part of cover flow (gone since version 11.) One might think that there’s some artwork loading involving those files but….

I haven’t tried Dougs scripts but once it rains (tomorrow) maybe I’ll get a chance.

I did the same, any albums that were still missing artwork after all of my efforts, I went into the folder and searched for them manually. Took me a few hours to get them all sorted, and missed a couple that I have since noticed and fixed. Hopefully this never happens again...

I solved using Retroactive. It is an application which patches iTunes in order to work on Catalina. We must get rid of the Music application since it is intended to link the media files to a single AppleID, a single home directory and, possibly, working correctly only in streaming.

When possible, one should even not update on Catalina, because there is no reason to do that. Just limitations bugs.

I hope Apple will change direction because this is just a way to loose costumers.

It's is indeed a hustle that should not happen with Apple software ...

For now all my Art is present, external HDD , Nas, Shared folders etc, no problem.

Yet i did needed to erase one song and add it again for it to start building up all the artwork.

All Art is Embedded.

Again, If you have the possibility to run Catalina on a External disk and booth from it you should see if it runs well for you or not.

If not you can keep all as is until it's resolved by Apple ... if they wan't to resolve it?

Over half a year after release of Catalina this horrible behavior is continuing to be a problem for many users. Apple does not care about your local music, as they want to push Apple Music and cloud services into your life so they can earn subscription based payments. They love those.

Another user wrote this and it's a good summary:

It cannot be fixed, putting the artworks in the user home is technically horrible. They should put the artworks together with the music files, otherwise it will be always buggy and misalligned.

It's one thing to come up with a horrible concept and to release that concept. It's another to stick to a horrible concept 6 months after many users have complained and just ignore your users.

As we have learned from the disaster with the butterfly keyboard, Apple released hardware with an error prone keyboard for three years until it decided to acknowledge the obvious. So prepare for this being broken for a really long time. Maybe this will at least make room for some nice music apps on macOS which actually respect your local music and do work.

Edit: Oh and this isn't a single minor mishap - the way files are now organized in books app on macOS made me look for alternatives as well.

Hi inAJet,

l feel your pain. I agree that there are many problems with Music. As you point out, the ones that I listed are only a few of the scenarios. I tried to define a few of the scenarios that I felt could possibly be addressed through workarounds. I’m thinking that most of the other scenarios will never have workarounds and can only be fixed by Apple.

As you point out, some issues seem to be related to database corruption or bad database design or incompatibilities between the way Music handles ripped music vs purchased music vs subscribed music vs matched music, etc. Hopefully, I’m wrong, but I’m guessing that these types of issues will persist until Apple decides to fix them - I just don’t see a workaround for these.

Hi Guy's

It seems you all still have difficulties,

Very odd, for me deleting one album and adding it again resolved it for my 30K added artwork,

It started with adjusting that returned album and requested to search for more and it kept adding all in the background.

so not sure why yours ain't doing it ?

Anyways good luck to all , and try not to mess it al up more then you want to

Cheers,

Ital

This problem is HUGELY annoying.

Found the same solution as NIKMS. From what I can tell, key is not the fact of left-clicking on it, but slightly moving, so that is snaps back in place, and considers it a new photo. Sometimes a quick left-click is enough to trigger that.

PITA for large libraries...

I've been in touch with executive level since March... The latest roll out was trying to address some issues, but not album artwork at all. The initial recent update made my tracks duplicate themselves once I changed any metadata. It seems that the supplemental a couple of days later may have fixed that but I still have the issue that if I change any metadata (easiest to see if you change an album name by something as simple as adding a letter behind it). Once the album title is changed, play a couple of tracks (note the track #), then exit the app. Reopen the app and ta-da most likely you will see two album icons with one having the tracks that you played and the other the ones that you haven't played yet. It doesn't seem to relocate the physical files (in finder they are still in one folder).

Engineering has this issue in hand. But what I'm hearing is that the album cover problem is known and doesn't appear to be of enough critical importance. I would urge all of you who are frustrated to reach out to the executive team (both Tim Cook and Craig Federighi) to let them know that it is extremely important.

My 12K album titles (1.25 T library) is a mess and I cannot use it on the $6000 MBP (8 T) that I purchased in January -- It was purchased primarily for my music library. I've been in touch with executive level support for over 60 days and the app is no more operational today than when I started... I've been on phones and supplying files for over two months with them...

10.15.5 + iOS 13.5.1 still huge problems with Music, sync, and iOS Music

Artwork still doesn't reliably appear in Music. And even when it does, when I sync tracks to iPhone Music it doesn't always copy artwork.

Sometimes, this is because I encounter whatever bug is removing artwork from macOS Music, even though it is embedded in the file and has always displayed across all versions of iTunes, iPod Photo, iPod nano, iPod Classic, all iPhones, etc. (I'm fastidious about metadata and artwork with 50K tracks going back 15 years of collecting).

In such cases, I manage to correct the missing artwork in macOS Music (usually deleting it then re-adding it seems to work), but when I sync with my iPhone those artwork change don't carryover like they used to. Either the iOS sync isn't seeing that the artwork changed and doesn't think those files have changed (so is skipping them on Sync) or it's some other bug.

Either way, it's atrociously bad.

I think Eddy Cue and the rest of Apple are passively trying to get everyone to abandon the idea of the Mac as the center of their digital universe. Pay for the streaming, pay for the cloud, think like a drone...

It's really bad customer relations. Just when they settled down from the disappearing music act/issues mainly due to DRM, and now the crossover to the new iTunes for Mac, not going to do it. I have gone through a couple times reloading everything. Now that I am almost at 775,000 and growing audio files, along with movies, shows, they just don't get it, a bunch of sour grapes.

For now I rolled back to Mojave, at least my mind is at ease, and that I know that this version of iTunes is fine and will not upgrade until major fixes have been resolved to the new iTunes and Catalina. Their main goal is to have everyone stream from their library collection.

I gave up and manually fixed all my album art. Several hours was a lot less time than waiting for Apple to fix this.

I wish I hadn't wasted money on this 2020 MBA 16/512. Remember when "it just works"? Not any more.

Save yourself some money and buy a Dell XPS and run either Win10 or Ubuntu. Both "work" and it's way cheaper and faster.

I am sorry but I cannot be much help as I completely gave up converting my library and started all over by making a new library in Catalina and keeping it local only. I imported all my music files from a backup that I have always maintained. Do not sign in to the iTunes Store or the Music app will replace your album art with what they thing is best. I lost a lot of restored album art before I realized that this was happening, All of my album art is embedded and stored locally, I maintain my iTunes Match library on a separate computer that has everything stored in the cloud. I could not do that with my main library as I am well over the 100,000 track limit.

Another problem is the loss of the ability to maintain multiple libraries. It ca be done but eventually things get messed up as the Music app stores all the art for multiple libraries in the same place.

The unfortunate thing is that I do like the application and still use it, I just wish they would put in some effort to straighten out the problems and bring back album art in song view.

Another thing they took away was the ability to store multiple images for each track. ( Front, Back and album notes )

Maybe someday they will make some corrections but ai am not counting on it as I will probably be gone by then.

I just read this entire depressing thread, and it looks like using Retroactive to drop back to iTunes is the only currently workable option. While this machine is 'Big Sur' compatible, my old MacBook pros are not, so even if this is eventually fixed in future BigSur releases that would not be useful.

Oh yes - I am still using Aperture on the old laptops via Retroactive. I will tend to stick with what works for me.

You can find the new artwork cache folder here:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Library/Caches/