Album Artwork disappearing with OS Catalina

Apple doesn’t participate here, so don’t hold your breath on that. To answer your question though, there is one bullet regarding iTunes migration in the 10.15.1 update, whether it actually helps anyone who’s already upgraded is another matter (mine’s just about finished with the update).

• Improves reliability of migrating iTunes library databases into the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps 

Here’s the entire 10.15.1 release note

What's new in the updates for macOS Catalina - Apple Support

i also have this problem my music collection is on a 2tb external ssd

i am already adding the missing covers by hand one by one

but everything goes so slow and when i start the app again it start very slowly up

because everything worked perfect for the update of the os Catalina

it is a bug that do this

please report this to apple this bug!

Music app won't stay open as it has a memory leak and eventually crashes the Mac , there is an entire thread on here all about it and by the way artwork was broken in beta 1 and they NEVER fixed it even in the final release. Sloppy Apple and shame on you.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250714510?answerId=251375439022&page=2

This is definitely a bug, and not self resolving as the move from Mojave to Catalina has removed artwork from the file itself in some instances. There is another thread discussing the exact same problem, I'm not sure if Apple consolidates these threads or not..? But there are other tips/hints/experiences there if people feel like reading more of the same.

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

I have a late 2012 iMac with a 3.4Ghz i7. During the iTune to Catalina Music I stalled the process several times with the cpu going into overload. I contacted Apple support and eventually ran the conversion in safe mode https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201262 s. I lost much of my art work that I have attached to various versions of iTunes over the years. It would seem that much of my original scanned artwork that was attached to iTunes on my G5 processor is gone. The artwork attached later after conversion to Intel iTunes is half and half. Sometimes just the cover while additional artwork is gone and sometimes nothing. More recent additions (past two years seems to be mostly complete. I went back using time machine to look at some of the music tracks lacking artwork and these do not show embedded artwork, if you look at properties of the file there is no artwork icon showing. So I am manually adding artwork back to the albums using scanned jpegs. This process is a little weird too. When I scan I usually scan all the images into a scanner file. Then I pull the group of images into the album artwork and hit "add". With Music it seems you have to add the album cover using the "add image" button in the artwork information tab and complete that first image attachment and only then can you select a group of images to be added. I have also found that if I want to view an attached image it is often too small to see the print but you can copy it to your desktop and open it in full scanned resolution. Meantime I still have my iMac G5 running an older version of iTunes that shows cover art like an old jukebox, and is connected with a red dragonfly to my stereo, while my main iMac is playing using Music.

I must admit that I am going slowly through the scanning process as I seem to be reading most of the scanned artwork and re-naming to be more consistent. My scanned artwork was in four alpha categories by artist name that allows a rough sort. Now I use last name, first name album name or part of and cov, bck cov and 1 2 3 4etc to catalogue the images in preparation for the next version of Music that deletes my artwork. Good thing I have kept all of those CD's and LP's...

An alternative I have been thinking about is to get a new iMac and freeze the old one at an earlier OS similar to my G5 that I fear may crap out sometime soon. This generates some issues with updting the old computer with new songs but the date modified field in the music library can be used to identify new music, or put in a hard date in the custom settings of the "recently added" playlist. Very disappointing overall.

This is what it says about the new Update:

The macOS Catalina 10.15.1 update includes updated and additional emoji, support for AirPods Pro, HomeKit Secure Video, HomeKit enabled routers, and new Siri privacy settings, as well as bug fixes and improvements.

Emoji

• Over 70 new or updated emoji, including animals, food, activities, new accessibility emoji, gender neutral emoji, and skin tones selection for couple emoji

AirPods

• Introduces support for AirPods Pro

Home app

• HomeKit Secure Video enables you to privately capture, store, and view encrypted video from your security cameras and features people, animal, and vehicle detection
• HomeKit enabled routers let you control how your HomeKit accessories communicate over the internet or in your home
• Adds support for AirPlay 2-enabled speakers in scenes and automations

Siri

• Privacy settings to control whether or not to help improve Siri and Dictation by allowing Apple to store audio of your Siri and Dictation interactions
• Option to delete your Siri and Dictation history from Siri Settings

This update also includes the following bug fixes and improvements:

• Restores the ability to view file names in the All Photos view in Photos
• Restores the ability to filter by favorites, photos, videos, edited, and keywords in Days view in Photos
• Fixes an issue where Messages would only send a single notification when the option to repeat alerts was enabled
• Resolves an issue that caused Contacts to launch to the previously opened contact instead of the contact list
• Adds a two-finger swipe gesture for back navigation in Apple News
• Resolves issues that may occur in the Music app when displaying playlists inside folders and newly added songs in the Songs list
• Improves reliability of migrating iTunes library databases into the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps
• Fixes an issue where downloaded titles were not visible in the Downloads folder in the TV app

I believe the answer to why it works for some and not for others is several fold. I'll describe a process for those with large libraries where your music files are on a separate drive/server. In almost all cases, those who have done this also store their iTunes library files on their separate drive as well (allowing them to access the collection from multiple computers).

Here goes:

• OS 10.15.1 fixes some core issues with the transition, if not all. If you migrated prior to this latest update, the best approach is to wipe your machine clean of all Music app-related files and migrate over from scratch. In other words, trash your Music folder and the file musiclibrary. Launch Music with the Option key held down and direct it to your "iTunes Library.itl" file. I know, this is straight-forward to most, but just in case it isn't for all.
• PRIOR to doing this, you MUST have your artwork EMBEDDED in your music files themselves, not in the Album Artwork sidecar files that Apple creates. This is CRITICAL to retaining all your artwork. How do you know if your artwork is embedded? Simple, but only PRIOR to being on OS 10.15. You would have had to run Doug's Scripts; specifically, "Is Artwork Embedded" against your entire library. When run against all your tracks, it creates a Playlist with all songs that don't have the artwork embedded. You must then select them all in this created Playlist and run another of his scripts called "Re-Embed Artwork". This will take the songs where the artwork is solely in the Apple side car and embed it into the metadata of the music file itself. This is critical to anyone with a large library (or any library IMHO) as it makes your music files transportable anywhere, complete with the artwork metadata.
• Then, when making the transition to Music, the app will find the artwork within your music files and display it properly.
• Yes - everyone having trouble has a legitimate gripe in that it appears Apple does not grab artwork from their "Album Artwork" side car files. For those of us with high resolution images embedded in the file metadata, we actually prefer this, but for those relying on Apple to have stored their artwork, you're hosed unfortunately, or so it sure appears based on my recent transition experience from scratch under the 10.15.1 update (which worked perfectly for 227,000 tracks) and the experiences of others that did not get all their artwork (who may not have embedded all their artwork in their file metadata prior to transition).
• For those able to work on their collection from a computer that is NOT yet on OS 10.15, you can also use another of his scripts called "Find Album Artwork with Google" to find artwork for your tracks in as high a resolution as you wish/is available. This particular script has been updated to work in the new OS 10.15 (v4.1), so if you're doing prep work on your music files prior to transition (meaning on OS 10.14), you must use the older version of this script v3.0).

I hope this helps a bit in possibly explaining why some get all their artwork and some don't. It also may help those with a computer still on OS 10.14 to prepare their library properly for the transition so they can retain their artwork. Feel free to ask any follow-up questions.

Interestingly, the mini player shows album art on tracks... not album. Here's a screenshot:

My album art seems to be in this folder: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.APMArtworkAgent/Data/Documents

It just doesn't sync with the albums correctly.

What exactly do you mean by "column browser"? To me that is the spreadsheet like interface where the user can select which meta data columns are shown and can sort using any of those columns. I've attached a picture of what I think you mean.

I see now, I had never used that view although now that you explain the use case it makes a boat load of sense to me. I believe that Apple's assumed use case for Music is streaming to the masses of force fed playlists collated by Siri. Everything beyond the fat part of the user histogram becomes specialty and starts to fall off of the list.

I'm still waiting for them to pull star ratings permanently in favour of the binary love option that appeals to the basic experience. That will be the last straw for me...

On the other hand they may take note that historically it hasn't been fruitful turning their backs on the, "creatives" who are the foundation that apple is built upon... From an interface perspective software becomes infinitely more difficult to build as each small functionality has to be maintained and curated for power users while keeping the simplicity and approachability of base functionality unobstructed for the masses.

I feel like they are listening, and each of their iterations are staying true for the most part. It would certainly be optimal if the long winded beta programs actually identified huge omissions like this album art fiasco... Or maybe just putting their best engineers back on the staple products rather than trying to build a flying taxi that locks you into a subscription for everything except the kitchen sink model.

So when I try to use either of Doug's scripts "Is Artwork Embedded" or "Find Album Artwork with Google", and I select more than one song/track/file, or I select one and use Command-A to select all, I get a "Cannot proceed..." message "Select a single track". If I select just one track it seems to work, but this doesn't seem helpful, how are you able to select more than one track? I'm using v1.2 of "Is Artwork Embedded" and v3.0 of "Find Album Artwork With Google" -- both on 10.14.6

I realize you're not "Doug's scripts support", and I'll search further, but this seems to be by design, however your experience is different. Thanks for your ideas.

I have a similar problem, but not quite the same. After updating to Catalina, a number of albums in my library don't have any artwork. I don't see any consistency in which are missing, some are CD imports, some iTunes purchases and some Apple Music. Waiting to see if they reappear. My iTunes Media folder is on an external drive and after the update, the Music app linked to the default location, not the external one as it had been in Mojave, so I had to re-select the external location, don't know if this was part of the problem. The artwork is still all there on my iOS devices.

You are right of course, I need to wait. But I'm intrigued that most of my Album Artwork has loaded without problems and there seem to be specific albums for which it doesn't load, even though all these files are available on my hard drive locally in my iTunes Media library. Some are CD imports, some are iTunes purchases and some are Apple Music. Oh well, will have to wait and see, but at this point I'm suspicious that these albums are not going to load the artwork.

After 24 hours, my artwork is still "kind of" missing. Some artwork shows up within the music app, yet much is still totally wiped out. But when I play the music through my airplay 2 equipped TV and Dennon receiver, the TV screen will not show any artwork. It is the generic gray icon for EVERY song. If a fix doesn't bring back all the seemingly obliterated artwork, I'm going to be really ******. I spent years creating a beautiful music library with lots of custom artwork.

I have the same problem. The majority of my album artwork disappeared after updating to MacOS Catalina. Reopening Music on a number of occasions brought the majority back but I am still short of a significant number.

Not acceptable having spent so many tedious hours ensuring I had the right artwork for each album. A fix is required very quickly!