apple music memory leak

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 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

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.

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.

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.

Worth noting the same thing happened to my movies but only approx. 10 of 879 have missing artwork, both iTunes store purchases and backups of BluRays that I own. All of my TV Shows retained the artwork. Both Movies and TVShows blasted through in a matter of minutes with no memory leaks, so clearly it's just Music that has a problem.

I'm also pleased to report my playlists have remained intact, which was an issue with iTunes following an upgrade in the past, so they have at least nailed that one.

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.

I agree with all of you. Things have pretty much returned to normal for me after a few days of frustration. Like most suggested, I moved the Album Artwork folder out of iTunes and it must have worked. It looks to me like my artwork has now corrected itself, and everything is working properly. Like most of you, I have been collecting music for a very long time and my database is very important to me. I have a lot of music that can't be found on any streaming service and other songs that I have personally edited to suit my own taste. These items cannot be duplicated. So I depend on this program mainly as a database for my music, and I definitely do not want any type of mix and match service. Thanks for all of your advice and comments.

Same here too. Once I start playing something in Music it can continue happily playing forever, but if I want to change anything - wake the screen from darkness, open another app - the track playing gets incredibly glitchy and won't close for 10 minutes or so, while it works through whatever it is doing. I can't even see what is going on in Activity Monitor as all of the memory is being used up by something - presumably Music as it is the only thing really running. This is ridiculous!

Even having left it running alone with no music playing for hours at a time hasn't cleared the backlog of tasks. OK, I've got 400GB of music for it to sort through, but at present this app is useless and making my machine unworkable in any other capacity.

This is a useful piece of information. I have a very large iTunes library and it and the media have been on a separate hard drive. Based on Wampinators response, I checked and the iTunes library hasn't been modified since i "upgraded" to Catalina. Turns out Music created a new Music folder and "Music" library on my mini mac and the Music app has been accessing that instead of the iTunes library. I tried to force it to access the iTunes library and it just went ahead and created a new Music1 library on my hard drive. Not sure what it all means at this point but the music app now says it is loading artwork so I'm going to have to wait and see and will provide an update.

Welcome to the party man. Be prepared for a few kernel panics, and if you're lucky it will continue to load your artwork. If not, you will have to figure out how to extract your artwork using a tag editor and reload it.

ok, so by opening iTunes and selecting my old iTunes library file, it created a new Music library file i assume converting the old iTunes library file and as of now it seems to be slowly but surely loading my artwork. My iTunes library is huge so i'm not surprise that the will take a while but the difference is it seems to be doing something positive now; before it was dead. I'll provide another update tomorrow...

Here we go again! I thought the problem was solved for me, but it has started loading artwork again. For all of you who have moved the artwork folder out of iTunes, where did you put it? Please tell me.

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.