apple music memory leak

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.

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.

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.

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.

I should say that the Music app seems to have calmed down re its use of memory now. I wonder if, like those people who've managed the updating process, the sequence of crashes I experienced were the app sorting itself out.

So... still haven't moved the artwork file or indeed any others and things seem to be ok.

Memory use with Music idle is currently 288.MB, playing a track it rises to 365MB. Interestingly, randomly and manually playing tracks from random albums in Album view has cranked the memory usage up to 1.32GB after about 10 or 11 selections. I left Music on shuffle for most of the evening 2 nights ago and woke up to find the computer had crashed.

I feel like I'm having to coax Music along to make sure its running anywhere near properly. Can't be a good selling point for Apple at this stage! I wouldn't buy Apple Music under any circumstances on this basis - Tidal, Spottie and Amazon Unlimited look far more stable. Am looking into other digital players/databases my only concern is that, like Plex, they'll only work with one outboard set of speakers at a time over Airplay as opposed to Music/iTunes capacity to use multiple outboard speakers

Disingenuous at best!

Just as an additional issue, I keep returning to my computer to find that my screensaver has not kicked in after the set 10 minutes. Guess which screensaver I use? Album Artwork. Just testing other 'non-iTunes related' screensavers to see if they work any better. Would be interested to know if this is affecting others.

Same issue here late 2012 27inch Catalina. Told to change power saver mode (in preferences ) to have the CPU nevershut down or sleep and let it go. Don't want to lose album artwork. 46K songs.

So in sum: is there a way to walk around the memory spill (more than a leak) and keep artwork?

But I can't even edit some of the albums.

So when I have the artwork on my Mac but don't see it on my phone, I used to be able to remove the artwork on the Mac, put it back in, and then it would appear on my phone.

But this option isn't even there now, so artwork is missing from a hundred or so albums on my phone.

Just bugs me. Hope Apple will fix this.