apple music memory leak

It looks like stopping Music, deleting the artwork folder, and restarting Music fixed it.

Unlike before , where the double-clicking on the lower left activity bar would just say "loading album artwork" and no status update, now it's looping between "download artwork" and "processing artwork" with a progress counter.

Memory usage is stable at around 600MB.

I hope that this was a one-time event triggered by my recent upgrade to Catalina. I'll keep an eye on Music for the next week to see if the issue happens again.

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!

Ok got a work around , I removed the album art folder from the old iTunes folder on my NAS and restarted Music app , its now trawling through my music as seen in activity , music then info but the RAM isn't increasing and sometimes actually goes down before hovering around 600Mb. Going to leave it now and let it finish.

Something about it using the old iTunes artwork data is causing the leak , maybe the way it's processing the data against the new app I am not sure.

Anyways I am feeling it won't crash now , as to where the album art is being stored as its not recreated the folder again I have no clue.

I can confirm that this fix worked for me, too. I deleted my entire "Album Artwork" folder and re-started Music.

The program is now "Processing Album Artwork," but my memory usage is holding steady.

With all due respect to a handful of Europeans, I have a very large music collection (115,000+ songs and counting), so it may take a bit of time for the entire collection to be processed. But everything is behaving very well so far.

I moved Album Artwork folder out of the iTunes folder. Opened Apple Music and some of my artwork is still there, some is missing (same results as before). I also don't see Apple Music "Processing Album Artwork" in the bottom left corner. Lastly, Apple Music isn't leaking RAM - currently running at 415MB. I wasn't leaking RAM previously.

It takes a while for all of iTunes to migrate to Music. Quite a while. One way to speed up the process is to go to the Apple at the top left finder bar >Preferences > Energy Saver then set computer sleep to "Never". Leave Display Sleep unchanged.

This will allow Catalina to continuously migrate info, even as you sleep. You can check by having music open to full screen and looking in the lower left to see if it is still migrating. Also, memory usage will drop to several hundred MB, not GBs.

Once it is complete, go back in Preference and change energy saver to you normal preference.

See my post , it works if you remove or move the album artwork folder out of the old iTunes folder. Something with it being still there is causing the leak.

My music is now ok and no more crashes

I had this issue too. All artwork was missing and memory usage was increasing rapidly every time I ran Music to the point where it would crash the computer if I left it running for too long.

Solution I found to work was to run Music in short periods of no longer than 10-15 minutes, or as soon as the memory usage got near the red. After doing this over the course of 3 or 4 days, all my artwork is now showing correctly and the memory spikes seem to have stopped. (approx 45,000 songs in library).

I didn't move any artwork folders as others have mentioned as a fix

It appears to me the issue is now resolving for me. I had a large iTunes library file and the media files (with embedded artwork) on an external hard drive. I since discovered that Catalina had created a new Music library file replacing this but on my Mini Mac which the Music app was using (but still pointed to the media files on the external hard drive. I'm not sure why this was causing problems (fact they were on separate drives or something went wrong when the duplicate Music file was created would be two possible reasons). Anyway, I closed the Music app and then reopened holding the alt key down to select the library file to access. I then selected my old iTunes library file on the external drive. A window appeared to ask to save the file to a new Music1 file (because it knew there was already a Music file) but it saved it on my hard drive in the same iTunes folder as all my original iTunes files instead of elsewhere. The Music app eventually opened with a message "loading artwork" on the bottom right of the window. Since then, it has been and is continuing to make good progress loading up my embedded artwork at a rate of about 500 albums an hour. My library is really large so it still has more to go but I am now assuming it will finish uploading all my artwork as described.

I'll then need to see how the App performs but I'm going to wait till the artwork is finished loading to attempt that.

One other thing I did that may or may not have helped with this is prior to the above I moved all of the separate iTunes artwork files out of my original iTunes folder so the Music app would not try to access them because this seemed to be causing some sort of performance problem. All of my artwork should be embedded so this won't make any difference to me but there was some junk in these files where iTunes had imported artwork before I saved embedded artwork.

Hope this helps some of you. I'll plan to post again after this painful process is finished or if new problems arise. Good luck.

Same issue with 500gb+ library - deselected ‘update album artwork’ to remove process, removed album artwork folder from extant itunes folder and moved ‘music library’ file from music/music folder to trash. Restarted music app and checked activity monitor, music app and AMPartworkagent working hard but not debilitating, and artwork loading, slowly but steadily.

Fingers crossed that all artwork will have loaded by morning. Itunes always struggled to update large music libraries, and now the music app upholds the tradition. If I’d known the problems I’d have, I’d have removed my entire media library before Catalina upgrade and download it from my Apple Music Match account.

I gave up after a week watching my iMac crash every fifteen minutes trying to update artwork and took the loss of 276 manually entered album covers out of 800 albums. Erasing and rebuilding my Mac didn't bring any relief other than installing the 10.15 supplemental update. Resource usage stabilized after the supplemental update where memory usage dropped to 3.5 GBs of RAM but with no more artwork coming in so I spent last weekend gathering missing album covers from the web (and keeping copies this time!) so I'm back to where I was with Mojave (but with Catalina) where everything works.

I've got three backups of my current library now (including Internet sourced artwork) on three external drives in case this same disaster occurs again. Lesson learned the hard way though it could have been worse. It took me a year to rip 800 CDs with zero compression (AIFF) and gather those album covers. At least I didn't lose any of the ripped music.

Try pulling any old iTunes folders out of the Music folder. Seemed to fix the issue for me.

I spent a lot of time with Apple support and ended up upgrading to 10.15.1 and problem solved.