Apple Music Big Sur Album Artwork Cache Rebuild?

I'm using Apple Music 1.1.3.3 on macOS 11.2.3 on a late 2015 Retina iMac. I have a large Apple Music library of around 100k songs.


Yesterday, none of the album artwork would display as shown in the screen shot below. This occurs with all views, and includes both individual track artwork from local files, album artwork (as shown below), Apple Music playlist custom artwork, and the like.


Curiously, all the individual track artwork still seems to exist, as one can see, for example, in the shot below. The artwork remains in place on other devices signed in with my same AppleID (macOS, iOS), and when I use the iOS remote app I can see album artwork when searching, but not when playing a track.



I've tried restarting Apple Music, restarting the Machine, and using File -> Library -> Get Album Artwork to no avail. A smart playlist with "Album Artwork = false" has only 55 entries, which is appropriate given my large library.


My sense is that Apple Music creates a cache of this album artwork to enable smooth and fast scrolling, but that this cache has somehow become corrupted. Any idea how to get Apple Music to recreate this cache?

Posted on Apr 18, 2021 7:06 AM

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Posted on May 20, 2021 1:19 PM

i tinkered for a bit a discovered that deleting the cache and then restarting the AMPArtworkAgent process were the important parts. so....


  1. quit Music
  2. delete ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data
    • e.g. from Terminal
      • rm -r ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data
  1. either reboot macOS or use Activity Monitor to find and terminate a process named AMPArtworkAgent
    • (opening Music will start the AMPArtworkAgent if it isn't already running)


(It might be that limiting step (2) above to the Documents subfolder of Data is sufficient; I did not try that. I found no harm in deleting the whole Data folder, though.)


The next time you open Music, when it wants to display artwork it realizes it's absent from the cache. It will then do whatever it does to acquire it "from outside".


In my situation I'm running a forked-daapd server on a Raspberry Pi. After doing the above steps, when I start Music and select my forked-daapd library (via the down-caret next to "Library" in the left sidebar), Music starts making requests of forked-daapd to acquire artwork. It starts appearing without further intervention.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 20, 2021 1:19 PM in response to turingtest2

i tinkered for a bit a discovered that deleting the cache and then restarting the AMPArtworkAgent process were the important parts. so....


  1. quit Music
  2. delete ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data
    • e.g. from Terminal
      • rm -r ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data
  1. either reboot macOS or use Activity Monitor to find and terminate a process named AMPArtworkAgent
    • (opening Music will start the AMPArtworkAgent if it isn't already running)


(It might be that limiting step (2) above to the Documents subfolder of Data is sufficient; I did not try that. I found no harm in deleting the whole Data folder, though.)


The next time you open Music, when it wants to display artwork it realizes it's absent from the cache. It will then do whatever it does to acquire it "from outside".


In my situation I'm running a forked-daapd server on a Raspberry Pi. After doing the above steps, when I start Music and select my forked-daapd library (via the down-caret next to "Library" in the left sidebar), Music starts making requests of forked-daapd to acquire artwork. It starts appearing without further intervention.

Apr 18, 2021 9:30 AM in response to mikelach2

I have a similar problem but it is as a result of moving the Apple Music media files to a different computer where some of the art work just doesn't show up but it is truly there embedded in the music file. My solution which has worked for me is to select the album with the problem, right click on it and select "Delete from Library", then "Delete Songs", then "Keep Files". Then from the Apple Music tool bar menu select "File", then "Import...", then locate and select the music folder where you store all of the media files and select "Open". This will take time to run depending on how big your music collection is, but when done the album and with its art work should reappear. I suggest trying this with just one album to see if it works before doing multiple albums.

Apr 19, 2021 7:21 AM in response to turingtest2

Thanks, turingtest2. I've done that. Music's been running with roughly 145% CPU in Activity Monitor, AMPLibraryAgent running with ~10% CPU for about 12 hours. It doesn't seem like anything new has been added to ~Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/ yet, but I'm waiting. Since my library has ~100k songs, this will take awhile and I should just be patient?

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Apple Music Big Sur Album Artwork Cache Rebuild?

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