apple music memory leak

THIS should be the selected answer (from Wampinator). It solved the problem for me. Not sure what I'm losing by doing this, but my entire collection seems to be fine.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250714510?answerId=251368566022#251368566022

I just wasted nearly an hour with Apple Support on this exact issue. Here are some screengrabs to let you know where Apple is at with this. (In short, "we're aware but we don't have an official fix" and "we actually concede that you can't run the Music app AND successfully use your MacBook at the same time.")

I am seeing the same thing (late 2013 27" iMac). Eventually after listening to an album or so and my 8 GB of RAM is exhausted, the music will stop playing and then Apple Music will crash. I have tried rebooting the mac and still running into this issue.

I have the same issue, I have to force-quit music every time and it is essentially useless after you run out of physical memory and the system starts to swap.

I notice that on the lower-left of the Music app, below the playlists, there's a status message indicating "Loading artwork...", I suspect this has something to do with the memory leak (for surely this is a leak).

My library has about 9000 songs. I'm not sure if this is considered a lot, but perhaps it chokes trying to re-load all the artwork from the migrated iTunes library....

Same issue. My memory leak eventually stopped after all my album artwork finished downloading. But now, I have a lot of albums which I manually imported that cannot grab artwork from Apple due to metadata issues where in iTunes I had manually added artwork.

My 30,000+ song library has crashed three times while doing the "loading artwork" routine so I've given up. Each crash takes more than 30-min to recheck the library before the app can even be used. Then the cycle starts again. I knew enough that DJs were being advised not to dump iTunes but I thought that had more to do with how they manage their tracks not something as fundamental as album art. Unbelievable. If it is a library size issue I wonder what is the current threshold size where it becomes unstable?

Also noticed that songs that have album artwork tagged to the MP3 do not show up in the Music app as artwork. This is absolutely incredible this was missed in beta testing and why Apple pushed this broken heap of junk into a public build.

Yep totally made Music useless for me now , my stuff is on a NAS and it now crashes with OOM after a few hours whilst doing the artwork.

Have to say been beta testing Catalina and its not been their most stable release.

So assuming it will ever finish doing the artwork upload it may stay up long enough for me to use it

Disabling automatic artwork updates in preferences doesn't seem to work for me. :( I unchecked that box and restarted the Music app and it still went right into its "loading artwork" and memory routine, unabated, as if the preference setting is useless.

I am having the same issue since upgrading. Will sit there for hours “loading artwork” and I can see the artwork slowly trickle in, until the app crashes and I get a system out of application memory warning. Opening the music app starts the whole process over. I have ~10,000 songs, and am on a 2013 rMPB with 16gb of ram.

I had just shy of 10,000 songs and eventually got past the error so there is hope for you still. Maybe something to try... watch your RAM go up in Activity Monitor and then proactively close/re-open Music before it crashes. Maybe then it won’t have to start over?

Thanks guys , I have tried to quit but the app is still running although the artwork window has closed. I am checking and it still gobbling up my RAM.

Hopefully Apple are listening and issue a fix ASAP

That seems to have fixed the issue for me as well. Thanks for the hint!

However, how Do I access the Media Library on my Synology NAS drive?

In iTunes there was a drop down menu where you could select the iTunes server but I haven't found anything similar on Apple Music yet.

I can now report that, after about 20 rounds of running the app until the memory runs out, closing it, and restarting the process over again, this fixed the problem. Apparently it finished churning through all my artwork, about 9000 songs. I did also un-select the "Automatically update artwork" option in the Advanced section of the Settings, though this had no effect on the original memory leak problem.

Good luck!