album artwork in Catalina Music

@JDM11STL, to import files on your computer using Music, try using "File / Import" (opposed to the former "Add to Library"), or similar to what was possible in old iTunes, just drag and drop the file(s) to the "Automatically Add to Music" folder that Music added where your media data library is located. In the latter case, Music will import your files using tagged data -- just give it a few moments after the Music app is going, if it isn't already. ...at least both of those methods have worked for me thus far.

In terms of metadata, I'm not encountering the problem you are. I have not had reason to change album art yet, but have specifically changed meta such as genre for individual tracks multiple times since moving to Music (using the right-click "Get Info" option when viewing individual tracks), saved the change from the Info pop-up, then went in using Finder (while Music was still running and not) and verified with 3rd party tools directly accessing the file that the tag was updated there as it should have been. It's working fine for me as I use 3rd party tools or manually copy tracks via Finder from my media library to a USB stick that I use in my car (and where the updated meta is available as I expect.)

Good luck.

I found a solution that's working for me. Doug's AppleScripts (https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2019/10/some-artwork-scripts-updated/) has 2 scripts that are very useful. "Save Album Art to Album Folder" and "Restore Artwork from Album Folder". Nice work Doug!

The missing column browser is a major problem for me. I haven't stayed long enough in catalina to find all the bugs or useful features that apple removed from the music app. That is because I used time machine to roll back to Mojave and I don't plan on updating to Catalina any time soon. The missing column browser is a major deal breaker for me. I would like to progress forward with all Mac updates but it looks like I am stuck in Mojave and I may never move forward. This is ridiculous and I don't know why we put up with it. I used to be a Windows 10 user but finally switched back to Mac a few years ago. Now I am wondering if Windows 10 (and running iTunes) is a better solution. That way I can update my operating system and just keep running iTunes to manage my library for the next 10+ years until Apple realizes the major mistake they made with this music app pile of junk and puts it back to the way it was before the screwed it up.

You have a great product and you tinker with it until it becomes a pile of junk. Kind of like what George Lucas did with Star Wars by altering the original movies. That is what this new music app has become. Bring back Jony Ives for goodness sake.

MacBook Pro 2018

I normally maintain at least five libraries. When I discovered that the Music App seems to handle just about everything differently than the former iTunes and since I have all my music tracks backed up with embedded album art I decided this would be a great time to just start over instead of migrating. I figured that this would clean out all the garbage from the old libraries. So I created four new libraries for my local files, imported the appropriate files and everything seems to work fine although I am disappointed that the column browser is not available and the album art will not display in the songs view. I know there has to be art stored somewhere but I have not been able to find it. I am also still trying to update my Doug's Applescripts so they will work with the new Music App.

The last Library I created was for my former iTunes Match Library which is for my favorite music from the 4 local libraries that I want to be able to play on all my devices and for which I do not normally keep any tracks stored locally. So I created a final library and set it to sync with my Apple ID and in about three seconds all of my cloud files and playlists showed up and all of the album art was available in album view for over 2000 albums with over 32,000 tracks. I have not as yet added any new music to this library.

I have observed that when I open this match library instead of seeing all my tracks greyed out for a few seconds while the application connects to the cloud it appears completely blank but in a couple of seconds everything appears and is ready to use. Also when I download a track it contains no embedded artwork ( I Uploaded all my tracks with embedded artwork. ). This is evident if I play the track in VLC or Mac Preview. However the artwork displays when it is played in the Music App and all of the art is there in Album View. I am assuming that it is getting the album art from somewhere as I can't believe that it is downloading it every time I open the library. My master copies of all of my music are stored on separate external drives that are not normally connected to my Mac and I completely trashed ( and emptied the trash) for all of my old libraries before I created the new ones???

Please enlighten me if you have this figured out.

I updated two of my Macs to Catalina 10.15.2 - on the Mac Mini the complete music library (~4,000 albums, all with complete artwork in their metadata) appears to have regained all of its album art. However, on the RMBP, the entire same library (both libraries contain the same music collection, which lives in its entirety on a NAS) still has no album art showing. The only difference - and I guess this must be significant - is that the Mac Mini updated from Catalina 10.15.1, whereas the RMBP, buoyed by my experience with the MM, updated from Mojave.

I don't know what to make of that!

So I'm finally okay with my situation. I deleted the new Music library from ~/Music/Music

Then noticed that in ~/Music/iTunes, my original iTunes library files from before the upgrade are still present.

After deleting the Music library, I opened up the Music app while holding down the Option key to get the 'Choose Music Library' screen and chose the old iTunes library. It reprocessed everything, and MOST of the album artwork started to populate.

There was still a fair bit missing, so I deleted the Music library again, restored the latest iTunes Library from before the Catalina upgrade, and tried it again. This time, it loaded about half of the artwork. So I deleted and tried again, and then it loaded almost no artwork at all!

I rebooted, deleted the Music library one more time, and left the iTunes folder as it was before I restored any backups. So it was now in the exact state it would have been after the upgrade. I opened music holding Option, picked the iTunes library, and let it process. Once again, MOST of the artwork was there. It seems to me like most of what was missing was artwork I had previously had iTunes fetch from the store. I then spent a few hours fixing the small percentage that was still missing, but at least now it was manageable. Before, it would have taken me more time than I practically have in order to fix everything.

Another tip: You can find a most (at least in my case) of the old iTunes album artwork in ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork but it will not be in a format you can use. I ran this folder through File Juicer by Echo One, and it extracted all the covers in JPG and PNG format. You can run the folder through the free version just to see if this will help you and purchase it if you think it will. (Not affiliated with them in any way, just REALLY helped me to save the rarer artwork that I had trouble finding online.)

Keep in mind, any artwork you recover in this manner will have a random filename and you will need to match it back to the album just by looking for it visually.

So anyway, my recommendation, based purely on my experience with this whole thing:

1. 1. Rename ~/Music/Music to ~/Music/Music.bak
   2. Reboot
   3. Open Music while holding down the Option key
   4. Pick 'Choose Library' and browse to your original iTunes library in ~/Music/iTunes or whatever alternate location you may have placed it in
   5. It will re-convert your iTunes library to a Music library, and should reprocess all of the artwork. Don't close Music until this is finished, as indicated in the bottom left corner of the application.
   6. Hopefully at this point you will have most of your artwork back without the need to restore any backups of your entire music library or your entire system.

Following steps are optional, but may be helpful in case you are still missing a great deal of artwork after this:

1. 1. Download File Juicer by Echo One
   2. Drag the entire ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork folder over File Juicer. It will place a folder on your desktop with all of the artwork images
   3. Visually look through the folder and find the artwork you are needing. Copy/paste or drag/drop this back into your album in the Music app.

It will never work correctly because now the library is not anymore self-consistent. Unfortunately, Apple wants put the artworks in the user home library (namely in a container: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent) and therefore, as long as this library is not regenerated, the artworks do no appear, even if each single music file has it embedded!

In this way:

• the library in not anymore self consistent when moved or an external disk or shared by more users on the same Mac.
• there is a wasting of space in the user home directory

This solution seems to be technically a nonsense and prone of bugs. The only reason I see is forcing users to pass through appleID and I Cloud since nothing works anymore without it.

Basically is just a killing of reasons to use a Mac.

I found a work around , or a solution that might work for all of you.

As their is no way for music to enforce it in reloading all the embedded artwork i just tried one simple thing.

I Deleted one song from My Library and after deletion i selected the song in my folders and launched it to play.

It came into Music app with all the Artwork with one extra goody

Music started to load all Album Artwork (it did not show it) it only messaged me when i tried to close it a while later that is was processing album artwork. It took Music a Very long Time to Finish.

So For Me case Closed (for now) to bad we had to find a solution or even had this BUG in the first place ....

Good Luck

Koen

I have the same problem. Movies seems to be fine, but it's the songs that don't display any of the artwork. Each file does have the artwork there as I can see it when choosing "Get Info", but it just doesn't display. Did anyone find a solution for this?

Nope, my 'Activity' monitor shows "There is no activity to display", and selecting "get album artwork" from the album itself has no effect.

Just for clarity, every single track in my music library has album art in the metadata. See for example:

Go Figure , once i saw not all artwork was added with the activity Music did.

I went towards deleting the Music.library file and restarted music with the option key pressed and selected my older itunes library file, and i lost all artwork now, yet what is happening , it adds all when played, it did not do that before so this is a good thing as off it is now finally reading the embedded info. (i also saw that some fields in the Idtags are gone, non existing anymore, need to verify with old MPB what fields exactly as many of my smart list are not doing what is needed)

Anyways something is very messed up with the Music app , for now it seems to add all artwork once it started to play and keeps it. Going to leave it as it is for now.

One of the reasons why i left Windows 25 Years ago is that they messed with all my work .. Apple please don't go their

Amazing really the contrast of Apple in the past to now. They never released buggy updates before, but lately it's all they do. Catalina stuffed my movie artwork although I have to say I haven't really looked at my music yet. I had to download new artwork or create it for myself, and unfortunately once I had removed and tried to put back a home movie that was not purchased on iTunes, it won't let it go back in now. I am not sure what to do, whether to persist with iTunes and TV, or just find something else. It was silly, in my opinion anyway, that they split iTunes into three apps. I liked it all as one.

All my music lives on my NAS so it can be shared by anybody on the network. I'd advise that you set up iTunes/Music so that is does not copy media files to the Library when you import them. It mostly works just fine for me ... album art problems aside :)

The downside is that, best as I can tell, the setting is a blanket one; so you can't set it to copy just your movie files or podcasts to your Library, but not your audio files.

DoubleJava wrote:

One thing that has come to light is that while each contributor to this thread has an Album Artwork issue, these issues actually vary quite a bit - in reality each issue should probably be broken out into a different thread. For example, here are just a few of the different scenarios:

1. Artwork shows up in the Music app, but the artwork is not embedded (and will not embed) into the actual MP3/AAC file. Here is how to tell if this is your problem: (1) Open the Music App, (2) Select "Albums" under "Library" in the left-hand column, (3) In the right-hand pane, the artwork for all of your albums will show correctly, (4) Now select "Songs" under "Library in the left-hand column, (5) In the right-hand pane, right-click on a song that you know is problematic, choose "Get Info", and then go to the "Artwork" tab in the resulting window. If the "Artwork" tab is blank that means that the artwork is not embedded into the song itself - it is just stored in a database somewhere (which is how you can see the artwork when using the "Albums" view.)

2. Artwork is embedded in the MP3/AAC file, but the artwork does not show up in the Music app.

3. Artwork is embedded in the MP3/AAC file, and the artwork does show up in the Music app in certain places but it doesn't show up everywhere within the Music app.

4. Artwork is embedded in the MP3/AAC file, and the artwork shows up just fine within the Music app on the primary computer, but the Artwork does not show up in the Music app on other computers that are sharing the library.

5. Artwork is embedded in the MP3/AAC file, and the artwork shows up just fine within the Music app on the primary computer, but the Artwork does not show up in the Music app on other users' profiles (i.e. different user logins) on the same computer.

6. There are many other scenarios, but the above are the ones that seem to crop up the most in this thread...

Great post. My post immediately preceding yours referencing the Apply Embedded Artwork script applies to scenarios (2) and (3).