Level 1

29 points

Apple Music "loading artwork" for hours and using virtually all of my system memory

I have a large music library

I upgraded to Catalina earlier

Since upgrading Apple Music has been "loading artwork" for my music

It's using all my memory (24 GB), has taken about 7 hours so far, and doesn't appear to be making much of a difference as most of the albums still don't have artwork

Is there any way I can stop this process?

Or better still, speed it up?

Or configure it so that it isn't slowing down my system to a snail's pace?

Any thoughts or ideas would be gratefully received

Thanks very much

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Oct 8, 2019 7:26 AM

Top-ranking reply

Jesadomo

Level 1

18 points

Posted on Oct 13, 2019 3:10 PM

I might have found a solution: Delete the “Album Artwork” folder inside your User/Music/iTunes folder. I did this and now the Music app is no longer using lots of system memory (In my case is now around 250-300 MB, after taking almost 8 GB in less than 15 minutes). Hope this helps.

Apparently when you upgrade from Mojave it tries to import the iTunes artwork library. Just delete that folder and you’re good to go. After deleting it, I reloaded Music and all my album covers were still there.

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59 replies

Oct 13, 2019 9:37 AM in response to yendoggy

Ah, no … even trying the manual "Add all artwork" thing? Once I'd managed to get that process going (and visible in the Activity window), it seemed to calm it down, and (touches even more wood, crosses everything) my Mac is currently behaving well. Really sorry to hear you're still having this issue – Apple have really, really messed this up.

Oct 13, 2019 11:15 AM in response to yendoggy

I gave up and formatted my iMac as it was crashing every 15 minutes trying to update art work and wound up with image corruption that Disk Utility couldn't repair. Interestingly after reinstalling Catalina from macOS Recovery and importing my library all of my art work loaded within five minutes except for 120 album covers.

I'll give it a few more days then manually search, download and reinstall whatever is still missing. Beats losing all of my artwork I guess.

Jaime E.

Level 1

8 points

Oct 23, 2019 5:10 AM in response to shedlock2000

My understanding is that the process of transfer the Artwork folder to the new location (library/containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent) is the reason of the severe demand of resources. However, I wouldn't delete the artwork folder too early since this could put at risk the artwork that you have copied by yourself.

For A or B reason I lost almost 2.000 artworks (15% of the total). Nothing to do but to assume it.

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 12, 2019 5:01 AM in response to boffe

The loading artwork has finally completed.

I would say about 95% of my albums have artwork now.

I am not sure why the rest are without artwork. They had artwork before and many are quite mainstream albums. Even clicking on "get artwork" doesn't work. I'll just have to manually replace the artwork for these albums.

Anyway, rest assured the process does finally finish. As I mentioned in my original post I have a lot of music, about 1 TB. That took three and a half days to complete the process.

HPM2012

Level 1

9 points

Oct 8, 2019 1:46 PM in response to mrnigey

Having the same problem - Music app will not stop "Loading artwork" and it is using almost 50 % of my CPU and a lot of memory (3 GB, and growing).

Any ideas or help would be appreciated. I have just one 8,000 albums and 45,000 songs.

TIA

Oct 8, 2019 3:17 PM in response to mrnigey

Same issue as well. I'm stuck on "loading artwork". Only 120 out of roughly 800 album cover's artwork has loaded on my 2017 iMac. Thank goodness this Mac is only used to host my music with only 8 GBs of RAM with 4+ GBs used by Music this could take quite awhile to complete. Music is consuming 42% of my CPU right now. It's basically unusable with constant beachballs if you try and execute any other commands or use other apps.

Stouters

Level 1

4 points

Oct 9, 2019 12:26 AM in response to mrnigey

Same problem here. Music is constantly grabbing all the memory it can get its hands on and I've had to pull the plug on it a couple of times when its got up to around 50GB as it's used all the physical memory (16GB) and is ravenously grabbing more and making the whole Mac unusable. Automatically update artwork is unchecked and it's not making the slightest bit of difference. Everything else with Catalina has gone really smoothly, but Music is currently pretty much unusable.

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 9, 2019 12:34 AM in response to unpopular

I suspect Apple don't really care about people like you and me who have personal music collections, and are just trying to cater to customers who use music streaming services.

For whatever reason at this end Apple Music has stopped trying to load my artwork. I'd say only about 30% of the albums have their covers so I'll have to manually reupload the covers if I want cover art. It feels preferable to being unable to use my iMac as Apple Music quickly swallows up all available memory (24 GB).

Let's hope a developer sees this thread and finds a quick solution

I'm not holding my breath though

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 9, 2019 2:10 AM in response to mrnigey

mrnigey wrote:

Interestingly Apple Music has stopped "loading artwork" for my music although I can see not all albums have been reunited with their artwork.

I spoke too soon.

Apple Music is back to "loading artwork" and using all available memory again

I wouldn't mind if there was a way of running Apple Music and turning off, or limiting the capacity, but it appears not. It's all or nothing.

This is ridiculous.

Oct 9, 2019 2:56 PM in response to blackdogaudio

I'm no better off than last night. A handful of artwork has downloaded but 85% or more is still missing. As soon as I open the Music interface memory usage hits 7GBs of my 8GBs of RAM and the UI still hangs at "loading artwork"

The only thing good I can say right now is my iMac didn't crash today like yesterday but it's not usable.

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 9, 2019 11:44 PM in response to Stouters

Thanks.

I'm off to try that now.

Apple Music has been "loading artwork" for a couple of days now and gobbling every bit of memory it can

I'm also going to try running my Mac overnight again in sleep mode. I just noticed on my computer, under Energy Saver settings, there's an option to have the maching in Power Nap mode which seems to allow some processes to continue whilst the computer is asleep. I'm going to try that too tonight.

I'll report back later.

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 10, 2019 12:03 AM in response to Stouters

So I've ticked Music>File>Library>Get Album Artwork but quickly the majority of my memory is still getting used by the "loading artwork" process. I have 24 GB of memory and now only have a few megabytes not being used.

Activity monitor shows that 15.3 GB of 24 GB of memory is being used by Apple Music

Apple Music is also using 70-95% of CPU

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 10, 2019 12:08 AM in response to Stouters

Stouters wrote:

....looking at the activity monitor it was churning through the artwork at good speed.

Where on activity monitor can you tell how quickly the artwork is being loaded?

Thanks again Stouters

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 10, 2019 1:24 AM in response to mrnigey

Sadly I cannot see anything different in my Apple Music pop up - I'm jealous of your progress wheel Stouter

Although Apple Music is still using the majority of my CPU and memory, the rest of the system seems to be working fine at the moment.

Given the enormous amount of music that I own, I'm guessing the "loading artwork" process is going to take about a week to complete. I've probably got about 20% of the artwork so far.

mrnigey Author

Level 1

29 points

Oct 10, 2019 11:03 AM in response to mrnigey

mrnigey wrote:

Although Apple Music is still using the majority of my CPU and memory, the rest of the system seems to be working fine at the moment.

Update: If I leave the Mac alone for a few hours, whether asleep or not, it's virtually unusable. All the memory has been taken by Apple Music as it continues to load artwork and I have to switch it off at the back of the machine and start again. Even Force Quit won't work.

I guess I'm just going to have to endure this until all the artwork is loaded. It's going to be a long and tedious process with a TB of music in my library. I wish there was a way of either stopping it, or restricting the amount of memory it takes.

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Apple Music "loading artwork" for hours and using virtually all of my system memory