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

Just an update guys...I probably have 70% of my art work back (only 276 album covers missing out of 8-900 albums stored on an external RAID station). Memory is still high 4.42 GBs out of 8GBs but CPU usage is massively better (92% idle) so the iMac is not back to normal but usable.

Home Sharing finally works for the first time after installing 10.15 on this music server as it's getting some horsepower back. (I could not access its library from any other device until now so I'm calling this progress.) I'm going to send feedback to Apple from this machine assuming it's got enough horsepower to gather logs and upload to the mothership tonight.

Hope everyone continues to see improvements....

blackdogaudio. Ran into the same problem. Right now Activity Monitor shows 78.02 GB memory being used by Music as it loads artwork. How could you tell that you were missing 276 album covers? Is there some way to check to see how many album covers loaded as to how many are still remaining? That would be great and at least give me a piece of mind.

Can't believe Apple didn't see how this was going to be an issue for people with large libraries switching from iTunes to Music.

I have a huge library of music as well. And none of them (zero) album is missing a cover. until now. I been trying for days. With minimum progress there are some artwork there now. The CPU is over 60 and it have crached twice. I can't sync my iPhone and the REMOTE app duos not respond to my MUSIC. I relay hope there will be a patch for this problem soon from Apple. Some of the artwork have been replaced with other artwork from another version of the album and not the original I have placed there. Luckaly I have copies of my library. But I don't want to go threw each one individually. It will take to much time. After all this years of collecting. I am so sad about this.

Good to hear...I've still got several hundred missing but my Mac locks up so much during the day while I'm at work with Music eating up resources I have to reinitiate the artwork download every night when I get home.

It does seem to be using less resources now so hopefully my Mac will remain stable and I won't have to intervene with a reboot every hour and the art work loading will finish with few losses.

P.S. I've reported all of this to Apple.

I concur -- the bugs in Catalina have destroyed what little faith I still had in Apple to produce a quality product. It's insulting to foist such untested, buggy nonsense on users.

I give zero ***** about album artwork. My music collection is more important to me than the fallacy of sunk cost for a computer I'll throw away in less than 2 years time. This is the beginning of their end...

Agree with all the sentiments being expressed here ... and delighted that the manual “Get album artwork” approach seems to have worked (touches wood, crosses fingers, etc.)

I really, really wish I hadn’t bothered updating to Catalina. I’ve lost several hours of my weekend to it so far. I’ll give it a few more days but a shift back down to Mojave is still on the cards. I’ve been here before with Apple — that disappointing feeling that, as someone with slightly older kit (iPhone 8, 2013 iMac: not ancient, then!) — I’m being left to fend for myself ... but the difference here is that Catalina feels like something I wouldn’t *want* to upgrade to anyway.

If there was anything out there that was any better, I’d be on it like a shot. But I have to use Windows 10 at work, and that’s even worse. Oh, for the halcyon days of Snow Leopard and Windows 7!

Thank you 🙏🏼 This may well have fixed it for me. Memory usage has remained low, and so has CPU usage.

Artwork comes and goes at the whim of AMPArtworkAgent I guess, but I don’t actually care all that much about album artwork on my Mac. I open the Music app and start my heavy rotation playlist, then Hide the window. I hardly ever look at artwork in the first place.

Hopefully this means Music stops modifying hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, filling up my Time Machine. I’m fine with waiting for a proper fix whenever it comes, as long as my Mac is usable until then.

In the meantime, I may also try reinstalling Catalina in place.

@mrnigey,

I just returned home, was out of town. Right now I'm comparing my MacBook which was upgraded with my desktop which is still on Mojave, and I found out that in Music, some covers are missing or incorrect, as @jducoeur mentioned.

Right now the missing covers are no big deal to me. I tried with one song (from AC/DC), checking and correcting the tags, this one was missing the "Album Artist" field, and is not getting the cover yet. I'm assuming that may be some Apple-side issue.

Wait and see if it holds... mine was better for a small bit but now back to hogging every part of my system when Music is open...

I ABHORE this app for a lot of reasons... especially the lack of the Column Browser option up top... makes browsing SO much easier than it is now... uggg... I'm okay with some bugs that hopefully get worked out with a software update but the browsing and lack of browsing options is a tragedy on this end for my work flow (I am a professional musician)

FURTHER UPDATE:

After reinstalling Catalina and having no major issues with memory hogging, the Music app now appears to be unstable. The app won't shuffle songs or play more than one song after another from one particular playlist (though the playlist works fine on my other devices). The app often crashes and upon re-booting, gets stuck on the 'checking music library' and crashes when I hit the shuffle button on that particular playlist. Seems like there may be a playlist issue, but I am not sure why that would be -- a playlist is just that (a list of indicators -- the actual music is stored on Apple Music).

Is anyone from Apple going to do anything about this? My MacBook is practically bricked due to this continuing bug. I can't play music for more than 15-30mins, after which I need to kill Apple Music. It's a total turkey. Even with album artwork allegedly up to date after much messing about and re-starting etc, it is useless., it continually wants to try and load artwork, eating up memory CPU. Total crap. Really. F-ing. Furious.

Same problem here. "Loading artwork" progress is very slow. 100 songs per hour, roughly. My library will demand one week at this speed.

Yep, I just counted the blank covers greyed out in the Music app interface which represents my local library.