apple music memory leak

I am seeing this issue as well, brand new 2019 IMac with 8G RAM trying to handle my 270G music Library, after the Catalina upgrade. I have already tried turning off automatic album art work updates. It pegs RAM and Swap in about 5 mins and makes the machine unstable. Effectively my music machine is not usable. Thanks for the great new OS Apple :( . I will try calling tech support next week but imagine it will be a long process as everything I'm seeing online suggests this hasn't been a smooth upgrade. Wonder whats going on in Apple QA?

I am seeing this issue, new 2019 IMac with 8G RAM trying to handle my 270G music Library, after the Catalina upgrade. I have already tried turning off automatic album art work updates. It pegs RAM and Swap in about 5 mins and makes the machine unstable. Effectively my music machine is not usable. Thanks for the great new OS Apple :( . I will try calling tech support next week but imagine it will be a long process as everything I'm seeing online suggests this hasn't been a smooth upgrade. Wonder whats going on in Apple QA?

I am having a very similar issue. I just upgraded to Catalina today and after opening Music my imac (5K 27" 2017) was barely useable. I rebooted all was fine until I opened Music. I checked Activity Monitor and noticed Music was using 46GB of memory! I had to reboot again because my imac was fine until I opened Music again. After opening Music and monitoring the Activity Monitor, I noticed some R/W disk activity and zero network activity. Had a hard time even posting this message because memory climbed up over 40MB and my imac is hanging again. Hitting send before It completely hangs up. Looks like Music is not useable. I will not restart it again until there is a fix or explanation.

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.

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?

Experiencing the same issue as others. I have a very large music library - 150k + songs, stored on an external drive. Much of the artwork has been manually added over the past 10+ years. Moving/deleting artwork is not an ideal solution. Posting here because I expect Apple to fix the problems identified with Apple Music, not me resorting to a bunch of work arounds. Apple, are you listening?? And also, bring back the column browser - very useful feature for those of us with large libraries!

I agree with you totally. The elimination of the column browser is bad news. It was, as you said, a very useful feature. I used it all the time.

By the way, are you the Tim Cashion who did the song "Somebody Said"? If so, that's one of the best songs ever. If not, please disregard.

Im worried the next update to music will mess my library up again. I dont have an "album artwork" folder anymore and my artwork is intact. Im concerned the patch may point the music app back to where the artwork folder should be. I guess we will find out. Im seeing more and more little bugs in Catalina by the day. Not catastrophic ones like the music one but irritating hiccups. My photos are constantly "curating". All photos are there, its just I have the curating animation running all the time. Overall its a pretty poor effort. Reminds me of owning a windows machine.

Apple Music is now consuming over 100GB of RAM continuously since updating to Catalina 2 days ago.

Unchecking the album artwork sync did NOT resolve it for me. The entire system is sluggish as the memory pressure is obviously through the roof.

I moved the album artwork folder. Approximately 90% of albums now have artwork.

When I manually try to add the missing 10%, I find out you can't manually change artwork anymore? Or am I missing something?

jannefromswe wrote:

I moved the album artwork folder. Approximately 90% of albums now have artwork.

When I manually try to add the missing 10%, I find out you can't manually change artwork anymore? Or am I missing something?

Manually adding artwork is the same as iTunes. Assuming you have the relevant album artwork, Select the album (right click)/get info/select edit items/artwork tab, then drag the artwork into the window and click done.

Something has changed in the way artwork is changed. Some artworks seem locked down. If you get the get info window open and move to the artwork tab and just try to grab the photo an move it, some artwork will start to move and some won't. The ones that don't move are locked somehow. You can't just cut and paste it right back in. The ones that move a bit will cut and past. If the artwork is missing and you can move it, must cut it and paste it right back. Music will go ahead and re-embed the artwork in the files. If it doesn't move, the only thing you can do is cut it, find another picture of the right kind, and paste it back in. I think it has something to do with when Apple uses proprietary artwork for the album artwork. They won't let you copy it directly.

Yeav, that's what I noticed. Extremely irritating.

Before, if the artwork was there on your Mac but not your iPhone, you could erase the artwork on the Mac and then put it back again. Then it would show up on your iPhone as well. Now, we seem to be stuck without artwork on our phones. Apple is more and more like amateur hour, where things work very randomly.

I agree with TCashion. Please bring back the column browser. It is extremely hard to navigate now for those of us with large libraries and playlists. I'm constantly working with my playlists. The column browser made it so simple to find anything. The new way is tedious to say the least. It has taken the fun out of it for me.

this sounds interesting. Can you expand on what you mean by ‘old iTunes files’ in ‘Music’? I have all set my music to live in in the ‘Media’ file. I’m not seeing anything specifically that I could identify as ‘old’. I have a folder called ‘previous iTunes libraries’ that lives at the top level within iTunes - do you mean this?

for info: 382GB of files, 22,250songs. Library lives on external 4Tb hard drive. No messages about updating artwork but my late 2012 Mac mini has crashed several times since installing Catalina and Music seems to have been the problem each time. Activity Monitor shows memory for Music is currently running flat at 16GB - way too high. Haven’t deleted artwork folder - yet.