album artwork in Catalina Music

Per @demenchuk's suggestion, I tried “Apply Embedded Artwork” but it had no effect whatsoever. To be clear we're describing the same situation, I have embedded artwork in every single track of my 40,000+ track library. If I examine any given track's "get info" properties the album art is there as plain as day, but whenever you look at any Album View list (which is what I look at all the time), none of the albums show any album art, save for those I have added in recently. The script appears to run normally, but it has no apparent effect.

Hi all. I have just skimmed over this post and need to also complain about this blooming music file. Why they had to separate the Album Artwork folder god only knows - anyway I have founds the artwork fold in the library - here...containers/com.appleAMPArtworkAgent/data/documents/artwork. My issue with this is that I have my Music files on an external harddrive - so far I have managed to tidy up the artwork on the Mac - BUT - when I move the harddrive to my MacBook the artwork has disappeared - the music library is available but no artwork. So bloody frustrating!!

It is indeed beyond madness. I had a lot of artwork that I spent hours restoring, some of which was lost. Luckily I have a backup that I have not touched since Catalina was installed that has most of the artwork embedded. Not to mention the fact that Apple has no respect for remastered tracks and reverts them back to the originals. They desperately need some options to stop these things from happening on selected tracks. Some of us like album art and need to be able to view it in the Songs View like we could before. I realize that things have to evolve however there is no need to destroy hours of work in the process. Now I have 40,000 tracks that continuously attempt to determine gapless playback every time I add music to my library. The last suggestion I got was to reinstall the operating system which is working fine for everything else. They need to fix Music and for heavens sake test it before releasing it to destroy someone's work. I pay for Apple Music and iTunes Match and I need to be able to decide if I want it to replace my upload or album art on a track by track basis.

While my music collection is large, I'm not doing anything complicated with it, and I'm still beating my head against a wall. Lots of playlists, Home Sharing, sync with iOS devices. That's it. I don't subscribe to Apple Music, don't use iCloud library sharing and I avoided iTunes Match like the plague. If I buy a track and change/correct the default artwork (asymmetrical default covers -- really?) or fix the metadata so things are named and sort correctly, that should be trivial. All the data is right in the file itself. For iTunes 12 on Mohave, it still is. I have a Mojave laptop and iTunes on it with the exact same collection of music "just works" except for the annoying need to re-add the occasional longer track that won't play past the 4'34" mark. I would not have migrated to Catalina had I not upgraded to a Mac Pro in December that came with it pre-installed. I have been fighting Music in Catalina from day 1 on that machine. That's just basic collection management. Don't get me started on the usability issues they introduced.

Thanks for replying inAjet!! There is definitely a big difference in what each script does. They are both useful for different problems. But I did make some of the temporary problems permanent (I had backups) by incorrectly applying the re-embed script. If I'm not mistaken, re-embed puts artwork from Music into the file, re-apply puts artwork from the file into Music. D'oh!

Doug's scripts are legit, but "Music" has been terribly disappointing. My TV app has the same problems. It is really sad how hard this has been. I've been on the Apple ride since the Apple IIe, and I know that this too shall pass, but this has taken all the fun out of getting a new Mac for the first time since 2008. The old Mac Pro tower still works amazing, but doesn't talk to my iPhone anymore 😭 since 2017. So I finally get a new Mac mini, fully loaded, and the software is just terrible. The amount of time it takes to save one album artwork is insane. The scripts run a bit slow, but manually pasting to a large group is about the same snails pace. Again, iTunes 12 on my 2008 computer is faster and more reliable. WTF Apple?

Craig Rumpel wrote:

The Apply Embedded Artwork script solution does not work for me, and this is the reason I jumped on this thread in the first place.

You're right, it doesn't seem to be a one-stop solution. As I mentioned earlier, I was finding that it doesn't work on first tracks or single track albums, but the issue seems to be a bit more sporadic as I continue to use it. It has definitely worked on many tracks, but leaves a few behind each time - with no obvious difference between the tracks that work and those that don't, adding to the frustration. I'm still waiting to hear back from Doug to see if he has an idea of what's going on.

DantasticManimal wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, re-embed puts artwork from Music into the file, re-apply puts artwork from the file into Music. D'oh!

Bingo! Good to hear you had backups. The difference in script names is subtle, but their functions very different!

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/

roberto_simoes wrote:

Not good user experience.

These scripts were made by an individual, on his own time, to help those of us experiencing this issue. If you don't like the nag, make a small donation to thank Doug for his time and then it will go away. It's a very small ask. The functionality of the script is there despite the nag.

Your other option is to simply not use the script and do the work manually, or wait... and wait... and wait for a fix from Apple.

HugeMusicLibrary wrote:

After hours and hours (and to date 4 months), I have gotten to the executive team support. We've recorded the issue... engineering has been able to re-create the issue. They seem to know what the issue is and that it does exist.

This is very encouraging news. Thank you for your time spent navigating Apple's support ranks to get to a level that was willing to do some actual troubleshooting, and for sharing the result with the rest of us that are frustrated by this issue. It's good to know there is hope for a fix at some point (hopefully soon) in the future.

I've always kept small "cover" and "back" jpg files in the album folders which I added manually to iTunes using "Add Artwork." I only had 20 of 470 albums' worth of art missing when I upgraded to Catalina 10.15.5.

BUT I've found that, in addition to the missing art issue, Music no longer seems to allow more than 1 piece of art to be added. In addition to back art, some people like to include alternate album covers & liner notes. It's just so laughably stupid to impair the one app everyone with any kind of Mac product uses on a regular basis!

Posting and update this old thread in case anyone reads this. I’m having the same missing artwork issue, and I’m addition to that, the Music app is doing strange things like randomly splitting my albums into 10 different albums. I also can’t seem to get the artwork to carry over to my iPhone and I cannot delete any music off my iPhone regardless of how I try (manually, though finder, in settings, etc) Most of my collection is ripped in Apple lossless directly from my 10,000 CD collection as well.

I have noticed something odd which leads me to believe that the music app is somehow incorrectly handling files. I’m noticing that occasionally a direct CD rip in Apple lossless will rip as a WAV-type size in mb’s. It’s not ripping as a WAV, because I have selected Apple lossless in the import settings, but it’s ripping at WAV file sizes. The weirdest thing is that I’ve done experiments where I delete the freshly ripped CD and re- rip the exact same CD and the file sizes are magically smaller the second time (more in line with Apple lossless sizes). This is concerning to me for many reasons, as I wonder what it’s actually doing in terms of quality. Either way, the music app / itunes are unable to tag album artwork to WAV files so I’ starting to believe that this is where the issue is buried. It’s somehow mis-tagging or mishandling the file sizes, and then it gets confused and thinks that they are WAV files. I have figured out no fix, but I can say that multiple hour-long calls to Apple tech support / itunes were useless.

Cheers

On a video I show an easy way to recover album artworks. If you find how to automate it, please let me know.

https://youtu.be/kSFqWg8oevM

Ah, that's helpful. Sorry for your troubles. In my case, my hard disk continues to spin harder than I can ever remember -- but as you say, slowly, some of my supposedly missing tracks are reappearing and becoming reconnected to the Music App -- I suspect because the Matching process (iTunes Match and/or Apple Music) is underway. I'm trying not to interrupt the process, but it's been going now for IDK, maybe 16 hours and appears from the Activity screen it's only halfway done. We'll see perhaps by Friday at this rate if the Music App is able to self-correct. Whatever it's doing, it's mighty weird and disconcerting.

I suspect that they are wrong.., they often are. I've found that most of my artwork shows up with the file in finder after moving to Catalina and Music. Not all of it does, and what bothered me is that some artwork which showed up with finder in Mojave no longer does in Catalina, although quite a lot of it does show up.

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.