apple music memory leak

I will say though – I let it just do its thing without changing anything, and it's working now just fine. 11,479 items in iTunes, and 4.04GB of Album Art in the music folder processed. Hovering around 300mb now consistently.

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.")

Just delete it. It sounds brutal but that’s the only thing that worked for me. It must be a whopper of a bug as most of my artwork was still intact. How that works with the artwork in the trash I don’t know unless it all disappears when I empty the trash but I would rather lose the artwork than force quit every 10 mins

There was a Catalina update earlier this week. I can confirm that this did NOT fix the issue.

On a brighter side, this has caused me to revisit PLEX and it's been great. Since the whole point was to spin off Music, and you're going to lose all your manually updated artwork anyway.... why not? At least this way you're not getting pestered every 5min to sign up for Apple's subscription service (#sothirsty).

FWIW my library is ~60k, about 90% of which is on a shared WD Wireless drive.

Turning off the artwork update helps, but even then, if Music crashes with an OOM error, it needs to verify the library at next startup and that takes ages.

It's insane that these issues were not fixed in the betas and ended up in the GA release.

The ghost of Steve Jobs will haunt you for the rest of your lives.

Yep same boat very frustrating , problems reported since beta 1 and yet they release it with the same artwork issues

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....

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?

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

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.

My impression is that the Music app just used up every bit of bandwidth while it scrambled to get everything as it wanted, causing the crashes and hangs. Now it seems to have caught up with where it thinks it should be everything has settled down. For me all of this happened before the update was rollout last week, so I don't see any connection there. Maybe some future limit set on the amount of memory that an app can monopolize would be helpful!?

After the updates, for the longest time while the artwork was updating, my screensaver would not work either. Like you I was using Album Artwork as my screensaver. After most of the available artwork loaded, the screensaver began working after the set 10 minutes. Hope this helps and maybe works for you.

Well, after many days of frustration, restarts, shutting down and reopening Music and memory leaks that made my whole iMac bogged down, the artwork seems to have finished loading.... and things are back to normal, more or less, with memory usage at a reasonable rate. Hoping that holds!

I just moved it up one level so its not in the iTunes folder

Finally something useful about this issue I'm experiencing too.

I try to cancel the album artwork folder. Let's see what happen.

Thanks indeed