album artwork in Catalina Music

I had a similar problem to RogerMexico in that my 30K+ songs disappeared after a couple of days of using Music. I was on the phone to Support for an hour or two, but to no avail.

Several days later, after I'd started re-importing music, I found the old Library file. It wasn't on the old external drive but had been moved. I was able to choose that as the Library and all my songs and playlists have re-appeared, but Music is so sluggish. It skips songs, I assume because it can't load them quickly enough. It's been "Loading Artwork..." for a few days. Anything else grinds to a halt while I'm running Music.

Replacing iTunes may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but Apple obviously didn't do enough testing.

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:

• Apple Support is via https://support.apple.com/
• Apple Feedback is via https://www.apple.com/feedback/

I've had the issue of the missing artwork since I installed Catalina Beta, and it's persisted even after upgrading to the official release. Now I'm having another issue where even some of the tracks have invisible names (see image). I wonder whether it's related or not. This only appears in Albums that are in my Library. When I search for the same Album on Apple Music it's fine.

10.15.2 did not do anything for my library that was converted when Catalina first came out. Will have to try deleting and re-importing my iTunes library before it gets overwritten in my Time Machine backups.

Sounds like it is better to wait for further upgrades than to move from Mojave directly to 10.15.2, am I right?

I have a large library (300GB) and spent countless hours over the years to add artworks and obviously do not want to lose any.

Thank you

I have a smaller library, and after three weeks nothing has migrated back to either Music or TV. I am not a fan of this new design, they should have left it alone. Change for the sake of it is never a good idea...

Well this is totally screwed up still in January. I just upgraded to Catalina to sync my music to my new iPhone pro, selected 'Automatic Downloads' and then 'Update Artwork' which perhaps was a huge mistake. Now most of my album artwork is gone and I'm in this horrible loop of flickering images and now notification after notification saying random numbers of artwork not found and the option to OK or SAVE???

Album artwork seems to be found then I go back it's gone. Is it trying to fetch every time in real time now or something?

So maddening. I will leave it open and see if it settles down but the way it's behaving doesn't give me any confidence that it will. If I turn off 'Automatic Update Artwork' now will I be hosed and just be missing it all.

The best remains not to upgrade to Catalina so far... Even though that basic problem should have been properly fixed for months.

Let's hope this is not part of a strategy to force us move to their streaming service.

It utterly beggars the imagination that Apple would allow such an egregious flaw to go unanswered over three updates to MacOS. May I propose a new corporate slogan for Apple:

**** off. Stop bugging me. Buy an iPhone.

Interesting. This is not working for me. When I follow your procedure, all that happens is that the album art appears for the one album where I delete and re-launch the one track as described. The message "processing album art", or something similar, appears during the re-launch phase, but is only there for a few seconds and disappears shortly afterwards. I can close Apple Music, and don't get any warnings about processing album artwork. I have repeated this a few times with the same result. I well try yet again, and leave Apple Music open for a few days this time, but I'm not expecting a different result.

Agreed. I now run PC and Mac after only being a Mac advocate since the early 90s. I don't think their current direction is the same as it was 10 years ago. They are losing touch especially with iTunes and ripping it apart. So sad....

Can anyone tell me please if this problem is not solved in Catalina?

I migrated to Catalina in Octobre 2019 from Mojave to Catalina and 75% of my 3500 albums were missing. After a week of crashes and no extra albums covers appearing I downgraded back to Mojave.

Can I migrate now safely from Mojave to Catalina 10.15.3. I'm especially worried Itunes to 'Music'?

Thank you,

David from Paris

Hi,

For me all works fin. yet i did have had my problems ... Music did not show all art (nothing actually)

Yet it did show all after 2 days ... perhaps due to my huge collection.

Nevertheless the way you sync your devices also changes towards Finder etc.

So you may need to understand that Catalina will change everything, also the way Music looks, and Video are Moved to Apple TV and so on.

So when you are ready for these changes please proceed.

Yet when seeing that you mentioned crashes

i would not go that way, as mine never crashed , so i wonder why yours did ?

So please check why yours did crash? was it the First release ? or perhaps not enough Memory ?

I have version 10.15.3 of Catalina on a 64 bit system with 32GB Ram and do not have any lag or latency in the Music app.

Hope it works out for you, keep in mind all the changes under the hood.

OR if you are not sure , Make an external start up Disk with Catalina and you can switch back to your version anytime.

Kind Regards

Ital

Since (at least some of) the issues were specific to upgrading from Mojave to Catalina, I can’t say if the migration issues have been fixed or not. What I can say is that if you upgrade and the iTunes-to-Music conversion doesn’t go well, then none of the Catalina releases (up through 10.15.3 anyway) will retroactively fix the issues.

So, if improvements were made, then they were specific to the migration process itself and not to fixing post-migration issues that had already occurred.

Sorry I don’t have a better answer.

I confirm the migrating directly from Mojave to Catalina 10.15.3 unfortunately does not fix the problem...

I do not understand how Apple can ignore such a problem they know important to their first users...