Album Cover Art and the Music (nee iTunes) App

My setup: I maintain an external drive music database on iTunes for Windows. I periodically migrate it to a Mac Mini, which acts as a dedicated media server for the household. The Mini streams to Apple TV 4Ks.

My question: can the MacOS Music app be made to use only the art embedded art for display on the ATV, rather than the cached art in com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork ?

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Background: I have been using iTunes for Windows for almost as long as it has been available. I have built a database of about 108k tracks; each has its own manually-embedded cover art.

My Windows PC is an outlier in a household with multiple Macs, iPhones, iPads, and ATV 4Ks. I'd be willing to complete the migration if it weren't for what Apple did to iTunes on the MacOS side.

The single biggest issue for me in music database maintenance and playback is how the cover art displays on the TV (via the ATV).

I have many albums with different by-track cover art. Some are self-created (collections of tracks by different artists grouped together), some are commercially-released single-artist comps (e.g. Beatles "Mono Masters") with intra-album cover-art variations (e.g. "Paperback Writer" picture sleeve).

Whenever the iTunes software (Windows or MacOS) fed to the ATV, cover art by track displayed fine (albeit with an issue with image dimension; a 528 x 600 image would be truncated at the east and west ends to square it up for display; annoying but not fatal).

With the move to the Music app in MacOS, this changed. That software prompts display of the artwork based on the image from track one of that album. In the example of "Mono Masters," if I am playing "Paperback Writer" I might see the art from the "Love Me Do" sleeve (first track on the album).

I have tried multiple solutions. One was using the Retroactive app, which allows you to run an earlier iteration of iTunes on the latest MacOS. This is a problem if your library is built using a later version, but I was willing to rebuild the library in a sandbox drive in order to try it out. (Result: it works on an Intel MacBook Air, not at all welll on a Mac Mini M2.)

Another attempted solution was to use the iTunes plugin in Plex. (Result: display is great when it works, but using it is a nosebleed with lots of problems.)

One quirk in my process is I generally limit playback to a single playlist (changed out periodically). I find that if I maintain the database and create that playlist in Windows iTunes, then migrate it to the Mac Mini and use the Music app, if I do a multi-edit on the entire playlist, eliminating album and album artist, and unticking the "compilation" option, I am left with a playlist of songs the app cannot group together. The result is the artwork display defaults to the embedded art by track, exactly as I want it.

Now, I shouldn't have to do this. It's a kludgy workaround, but I can make it go (as long as I import the library all over again the next time I want to start up a different playlist). But the described workaround implies that display of embedded art (and *only* embedded art) by track can be made to happen.

My overall concern is that this kind of local database maintenance is becoming a lost form. People are streaming from Spotify or whatever, and don't want to engage in the stress and time-suck of corralling, say, a terabyte of songfiles and attached data. So, software solutions on this front are not expected from Apple, and it may just be a matter of time before iTunes for Windows mutates or dies off.