apple music memory leak

Ok, got past the main problem with my 32,000 song library. I moved the 'Album Artwork' folder out of its starting place in Music/iTunes, which seemed to allow the Music app to run without running out of memory. I may have proactively closed the app a few times along the way. At some point it finished downloading but I noticed there were still many albums still missing artwork. A smart playlist came back with almost 2,000 songs still missing artwork (a lot were albums, so counting is a bit off). I could right click and get artwork for some of them (why did I have to do that?) and now I'm down to the hardcore set that are going to need a search engine and manual attention. Feel like I've been here before but way at the very beginning of this technology, not really fitting for the here and now of how things should work in 2019.

I deleted everything inside the folder after copying its contents (for safe keeping) to the desktop.

When I re-opened the Music app, the artwork was all re-processed, and after a few hours (I have huge collection), the program is still open and working fine.

This 100 percent solved my problem. It's definitely worth a try.

I saw this problem in Beta 1, and immediately reverted back to Mojave because of it. So I was dismayed to find the problem still persists in the public release.

Like others here, I do actually like iTunes and have spent 10 years crafting it exactly how I want it. More crucially for me, it contains a lot of older content not available online, which have fond memories attached to them. It's no different to a treasured record or tape collection, it's just a digital version of that. I can see why vinyl is making such a huge comeback at the moment. No one can't take your vinyl away from you at will, or randomly reorder your collection for no reason, or swap/delete some vinyl sleeves, but not others, etc.....

....aaaaanyway..... I stuck with it this time and was fortunate enough to not have suffered as badly as others. Memory use remained fairly stable at around 9GB throughout the process with no need to close/reopen Music. My system is an i7 2.6 GHz Mac Mini with 16GB ram, 1TB SSD and my library is on an external Thunderbolt 4TB drive. 10,000 songs, 110GB...... which is probably why I didn't suffer as badly. It took about 40 mins to rebuild the artwork database, with just a handful of stubborn stragglers which may need manual intervention.

We all know computers chug along chronically with 1000s of small files vs 1 huge file, so we can cut Apple some slack for that as it isn't their fault, however, this really ought to have been picked up by QA. Checking application behaviour when it's opened is fairly fundamental stuff, no?

I did notice the memory leak reduces if you leave Music on 'Songs' under 'Library', which is just a text list. If I put it on 'Albums', where it has to draw all the icons and populate with art, the leak increased substantially.

Anyway, sub'd for updates on a fix. Ciao.

Someone who understands me :)

My digital files are almost so important to me as my vinyl collection. Lot of the music I like and listen to are not on streaming services. I’m a Spotify heavy user but it’s frustrating that so many good records are not on the platform. Not to mention when a label or an artist pull out its entire discography from the streaming services. I don’t want to be depended of that.

About the memory leak...i also

moved the “Album Artwork” folder out of iTunes folder and it worked for me.

After a while things went back to normal. I did lose some covers but the majority stayed intact. So, I advise you to do the same. My Mac lives again.

Greetings from Portugal.

This is a real problem. If you move the Album Artwork folder out of iTunes, your Activity Monitor and computer speed return to normal at the expense of a lot of your Artwork. Literally hundreds or thousands of images might be missing. If the Artwork is important to you, this is a real problem. any thoughts?

Even better, I deleted the album artwork folder, restarted and:

- no more memory leak;

- almost all artwork was back immediately, even cd-covers I can't remember have seen when I used iTunes.

(most of my music are ripped CDs, without artwork as metadata inside the .m4a, so Apple must be the source)

There is a new Software update out today for Catalina. Anyone still having the issue try the new update?

UPDATE : Just update to Catalina 10.15.1 and no memory leaks anymore ;-)

I moved `Album Artwork` out of the iTunes folder and iTunes seems to behave better.

It seems to be `Processing Album Artwork` in a different, healthier way, without using all the memory.

I have a fair slice of my album artwork intact so I'll work like this until there is a fix

I was just about to write down the same experience

With the "Activity Monitor"-app opened and the Timer on my phone set for 10 minutes just opening the Music-app see memory usage rise to about 20 GB (iMac with 16 GB).

At that time MacOSX Catalina is still responsive, quit the Music app, seeing memory usage drop below 1GB.

Wait a couple of seconds and then repeat. Open Music, see memory usage rise to about 20 GB, quit Music again, see memory usage drop below 1GB.

One evening of repeating these steps about 15 or 20 times did the job. Finally I can enjoy my music again, with all my album art in the new Music app.

Check your original files and see if the artwork was actually embedded in the music. Many older CDs and downloads did not have the artwork embedded, which means you had to add it manually.

Also, try right clicking over an album without art work and go to "get album artwork" that has brought up artwork that Catalina did not. You can click on multiple albums by holding down the Apple/command key which should show with a red outline, then right click and bring up the list.

Must admit that Catalina release is one of the worst one Apple ever has ever done. Taken over a week to get my Lat 2012 27" iMac back to any semblance of normal. Still have issues.

I found by disabling `Automatically update artwork` in the advanced tab of Preferences to solve the memory leak.

This is not ideal but a workaround for now.

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.

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?

UPDATE to all - I call Apple services, I did 2 things with them - 1st, I reinstall MacOS Catalina .... did not solve the problem - 2nd I create a new TEST profil on my mac with the minimum program loaded, and it seams that the Music apps do not eats all the memory. But I don't thing it's a viable solution. So maybe it is a combination of many program loaded in the same time. The say they are going to follow up with technical support ..... will see ;-)

Last time I run Music apps it goes to 20GO before I close the apps, and I did not play any music at all !!!