Music album art cache taking up too much space - can I change location to external hard drive?

Hello

Sorry for yet another Music App Album Artwork cache folder question.

I appreciate that I use iTunes/Music in a very different way to most I imagine, so my problem may not be a very common one... sorry. I use iTunes/Music as an archive system for my electronically recorded vinyl collection, with each song having a jpeg picture embedded within it: a photo of the actual vinyl record label or cover, in the cases of LPs... to be perfectly honest... for LPs I have 3 JPEGs: label, front cover and back cover.... it may sound crazy, but there is a lot of beauty and incredibly interesting and helpful info in all of these pictures. Mostly Apple lossless files, some high quality MP3s… huge collection (70K + songs / roughly 1TB) literally years of 'work' -ask my wife ;). No downloads, purchases or other... just 'ripped' vinyl, so not a single file with a picture that isn't a picture of the record itself.

I had all the actual music files on an 5TB external hard rive, as well as the iTunes .itl file and (I assume) the iTunes artwork cache.

It all worked fine until a bit of a OS update jump: from Yosemite (or El Capitan?) to Monterey. iTunes disappeared, in came ‘Music’.

I really struggled with the search function - now called filter- which is failing: missing files in its search results which I can find using other search terms. Some of the ones initially missing from some searches are now appearing in the same search… so it may be something uploading in the background still? I use the search function all the time... the whole point for me is the archiving system: I need to be able to find the tune from the label, the producer, the rhythm track, the sub-genre, the era etc etc.... all this info is in the file ID tags which should all be searchable... sometimes I have to resort to flicking through artwork as all I can accurately remember of the tune is maybe the genre and colour/look of of the label :)....

So by far my biggest grief was with artwork. After a lot of forum browsing, I learnt where the artwork cache was (/Users/xxxx/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents), found Doug’s useful scripts (https://dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php ) and managed to painstakingly fix the majority of the files’ artwork display. Roughly 10% still won’t load: artwork still clearly embedded in file as can be seen in the tiny display square adjacent to the ‘now playing’ song info display, as well as big and clear in the mini player window view).

This fix led to a new problem for me… of size… with the music artwork cache filling up with thousands of jpeg files… it soon takes on epic proportions, sometimes 90GB+ and makes everything slow / impossible to work the computer.

So my question is around a fix for this which does not involve any messing with the embedded artwork. Ideally I want both good artwork display (as comprehensive as possible) of embedded artwork on the Music software, but also minimal used space on the computer hard drive. If I had to chose, I would obviously go for less space on the hard drive so my computer remains useable… this is what I am currently doing: deleting all the accumulated JPEGs in the Music artwork cache on a daily basis…

QUESTIONs-

1/ Is it possible to get Music App to to store the album cache folder on an external hard drive?

2/ Better… I don’t remember ever finding a huge folder of JPEGs with iTunes folders… so I’m assuming iTune didn’t physically store all the JPEGs but pulled them out from the embedded file as and when needed? If this is correct… is there any way to make the Music App to this?

Thanks

Matt