apple music memory leak

Pete Marchant wrote:

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.

Ignoring the missing artwork, will your files play ok? If so then the music app is "seeing your library". Try deleting the artwork folder that should solve the issue. Theres confusion about the actual library (where the physical files are) and the library files (which are the sort of things that end up in the "previous iTunes library" folder. These files are the playlists and play counts and the files are minute but you need then for the library to work. Basically, the "new" music app is a chunk of iTunes from what I can tell. This is probably where youre seeing the "old iTunes" remarks as the files and folders look the same. All theyve done is dumb it all down for the phone generation that cant work out why a film is in an app with a musical note on it. I have a feeling the artwork is being accessed and stored somewhere else on the mac but the music app is still being partially pointed toward the old artwork folder and perhaps comparing the 2 which is where the memory leak is hammering the ram as it gets into a perpetual loop. Some people reported a large loss of music artwork when removing the folder. I lost a handful of artwork which may not even have been there in the first place. Clearly the music app in not ready for the public due to the number of variable results from users. None of my friends have any issues at all with music so its definitely larger libraries that are effected. In my tech support call to apple, they suggested apple music which speaks volumes to me. They dont want you to manage all your music, they want you to pay apple £10 per month for them to manage it.

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

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!?

I had the memory leak issue. I force quit Music, but it still said my system was out of memory. I reboot it, started Activity Monitor and Apple Music app. The status bar says loading artwork and the memory is up to 5GB now.

My artwork folder size is 5GB.

My iMac has 40GB RAM so it will take some time to fill up.

I will update this thread after I see if it crashes or not. Post how much memory Music was using if you can capture it.

It looks like stopping Music, deleting the artwork folder, and restarting Music fixed it.

Unlike before , where the double-clicking on the lower left activity bar would just say "loading album artwork" and no status update, now it's looping between "download artwork" and "processing artwork" with a progress counter.

Memory usage is stable at around 600MB.

I hope that this was a one-time event triggered by my recent upgrade to Catalina. I'll keep an eye on Music for the next week to see if the issue happens again.

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?

I gave up after a week watching my iMac crash every fifteen minutes trying to update artwork and took the loss of 276 manually entered album covers out of 800 albums. Erasing and rebuilding my Mac didn't bring any relief other than installing the 10.15 supplemental update. Resource usage stabilized after the supplemental update where memory usage dropped to 3.5 GBs of RAM but with no more artwork coming in so I spent last weekend gathering missing album covers from the web (and keeping copies this time!) so I'm back to where I was with Mojave (but with Catalina) where everything works.

I've got three backups of my current library now (including Internet sourced artwork) on three external drives in case this same disaster occurs again. Lesson learned the hard way though it could have been worse. It took me a year to rip 800 CDs with zero compression (AIFF) and gather those album covers. At least I didn't lose any of the ripped music.

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 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.

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.

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.

Plex is ok for video, not music. Plex devs have lost their way are trying to move from their original personal media library management to a streaming subscription / advertisement system .

That's their choice. I still have my Plex pass that came with a now- broken promise, but I stopped recommending them to anyone since they've shown that they cannot be trusted.

Sadly, this music app leaves a lot to be desired. Unless I'm missing something, there's no way to hold your place anywhere in here. You can't just go back to where you were. That's not convenient if you are trying to edit playlists and return to your previous place. You have to start all over. Without the column browser, it is very inconvenient. Maybe Apple has hired some Microsoft people to handle this(LOL). Previously, it was simple to find anything you wanted, make changes and back up. Please correct me if I'm wrong. This is most frustrating.

I guess we can't roll back to Mojave now? Well, unless someone is hosting older builds online somewhere?

I really liked Mojave. It was really stable and Apple had finally got iTunes to a good place.

To be fair, I'm impressed my 2012 Mac Mini keeps marching on like a trooper with each iteration of Mac OS. 8ish years isn't a bad lifespan by today's standards. But now we are back in the good old days of software upgrades being 2 steps backwards, 1 step forwards.

Anyway, as others have found, whilst playing Music my desktop is having a hard time. Especially in Safari where the mouse jitters and jerks its way across the page. Shut down Music and all is good again. I have zero issues with TV and Podcasts.

I get why Apple are trying to unify their platforms, but butchering iTunes like this was ill conceived and poorly executed.

I will give them a chance to rectify it though before switching back to Mojave, or heaven forbid, Windows!

Oh and has anyone else noticed two https:\\apple.music threads running in Activity Monitor when Music is open? I'm not even subscribed to it, and don't want to be, so why that is consuming resources is a mystery. Apple? Are you there? Are you listening?