album artwork in Catalina Music

Maybe someone who has a newly purchased Mac with an Applecare+ subscription can call apple and keep the ticket open until the issue is resolved - then come back here and share the solution. 😁

While Apple's after warranty support is pretty nonexistent, I actually have had very good experiences with their Applecare+ support - every time I called them I got a fix...sometimes within a few minutes and sometimes within a couple of weeks, but I always got one. Unfortunately, my Applecare+ subscription ran out about a year ago, and they don't allow you to renew it (which is a sore spot for me, because I'm willing to pay for another term, but that is another issue for another day.)

I had not thought of that, perhaps my original artwork is still there if I view it outside of the music app. I will have to do a little research.

I do subscribe to Apple Music and also I have kept my iTunes Match subscription because I am probably going to drop Apple Music in the near future. I use iTunes Match to sometimes find better quality files for some of the Big Band Records I have ripped. However that said Apple Music and Match are in a separate library on another PC. My main library is on my MacBook Pro and stored only locally on a 2 TB Samsung T5 SSD using the Catalina Music App. I ended up starting over with Catalina and imported my entire library into the Music App however in retrospect I had not unchecked the automatically update artwork option when I started importing my albums which probably caused my artwork problems. I did not connect Match or Apple Music with this library.

I have a lot of Big Band that was ripped from LP's and some from 78's. I am a devoted Les & And Larry Elgart Fan as they were probably the last Big Band to be commercially successful. I manage a Facebook Group called "The Elgart Sound" and have a lot of former big band members which I have become friends with and enjoy it very much. We are not exclusively Elgart as we support the "Big Band Era" and the "American Songbook".

Add me to the list of those who cannot see the album artwork after updating to Catalina. I've let the Music App run for over 24 hours and it still has not updated the album artwork. Is there a way to delete the Album Artwork Cache and have Music rebuild it?

Could the commercial reason be to try to push everyone onto 2tb of iCloud storage?

Has anyone lost their artwork who is on iCloud?

For my missing artwork I’ve decided to manually go for 1000 x 1000 JPEG’s. Anyone see any problems with that ?

I do not think that is the reason since your iTunes Match cloud storage is limited to 100,000 tracks and not by size of the track. Besides that any song purchases through the iTunes Store do don't count toward this limit. Basically what they are storing for you are only those tracks it could not match.

Before I unchecked automatically update artwork in preferences and disabled iTunes Store I did lose some of my original restored artwork. and have effectively lost all of my artwork for the back cover and other images that I had stored with each song. They are actually still there but are not currently accessible via the Music App. I do not even sign in to my profile through the music app so basically I do not have anything stored in the cloud , only locally, There are so many issues that need fixed it is confusing for anyone.

I would proceed with extreme caution and backup all of my music before proceeding.

It cannot work with multiple libraries, because it is exactly conceived to prevent it. The idea is to link the library to a single user home. That is, preventing any way of sharing, even on your own private network, without iCloud and the appleID.

The only solution, which works really fine, is to reinstall iTunes via the Rectroactive application.

I also deleted completely Music, Podcast and Books by booting from from a previous MacOS (you cannot do it on Catalina) because all these application fills your home with their media files (look to the containers in your home/library).

Hey everyone still participating in the shillshow that is the macOS Music app:

My artwork problems persist, but Doug's Re-Embed Artwork script has helped when needed. That said, it works curiously: sometimes the file size stays the same, often it's reduced a bit, sometimes it's larger. I assume that Doug's script is re-processing the artwork in some way, exporting it at JPEG setting different from original resulting in more lossy-ness. I wrote him asking him if this was the case but never got a reply back. Since he never replied, I didn't feel like kicking him a tip so I do have to deal with the constant nag boxes which is quite annoying.

My second big update is that I smashed my 11 Pro to bits on a bike ride, so I got a brand new one and started about as fresh as you can get with iPhones. Nonetheless, the artwork issue persists copying items from Mac to iPhone if the artwork doesn't appear in Music app. In other words it's definitely nothing on the iOS side of things, in my experience.

Lastly, I think I may have figured out a possible culprit but need to do more experimenting. I always rip my audio to FLAC or ALAC, and then use XLD to covert to V0 MP3 when I want the smaller file size. I *think* a lot of the artwork issues I've encountered are with files that were created with XLD. In other words, XLD isn't applying artwork the way MP3 files "typically" apply artwork, if that even makes sense & is possible.

Like Doug's scripts, XLD does some funny business with artwork, too. If it's not embedded in the FLAC file, it will sometimes use an image contained with the FLAC folder instead (especially if it has an obvious name like cover.jpg). But I don't think it applies the image as-is, to avoid making every file 5MB bigger if you have a 5MB PNG of the cover art, for instance. Instead it does it's own re-sizing and re-compression and however it embeds that image might be part of the problem.

Please continue to share your thoughts while we do Craig Federighi's QA teams' job for them.

I had Apple Support on the line (I'm up to my 5th "Senior" Adviser) for another problem and, while waiting the 24 minutes for MacOS Catalina to fully reinstall, mentioned to my Adviser that Apple was cooking up some trouble for itself in the Support Communities about this Music issue. Apple advisers are steadfastly tactful, diplomatic and resilient in terms of criticism: "Well, you see, Apple would appear to be following the trend of streaming and licensing use of music and such like, since that's the direction the world is taking now." I replied, "But does Apple not realise that it is precisely because Apple struck out on its own path, because Apple thought for itself and not like all the others, that's precisely the reason I went for Apple in the first place. So, they're following the pack now?" For once, it seems, the diplomatic response was silence.

I also unfortunately have run into this issue. I had an extensive collection that needed to moved and consolidated between 2 external drives (500GB) each and another almost 500 GB from a Windows 10 machine. I wish after all of this they would have left iTunes as it was until every possible fail scenario was tested before completely migrating to a new program all together. I expect Apple to be ahead of Windows in regards of ease of use/migration for people wanting to leave the Windows world not a very good step.

Hi everyone,

I had this issue too and I managed to fix it.

Background :

I recently bought a 2017 Macbook pro running under Catalina and had to move from a 2010 Macbook pro running under El capitan.

All my songs are imported from files on my laptop, nothing from itunes store.

When I import songs, itunes copies them in a folder I chose a while ago.

I don't have the option Consolidate my files selected.

I transferred the itunes folder and my folder with all the music files on my laptop. Then I created a new library when opened the Music app with option key and chose the .itl file from my old itunes.

Everything was here except a few files that were missing (less than 10 out of 4000+) and I located them manually.

Then I realized that all artworks were missing : Searching them on the store worked, except for the ones that the itunes store doesn't know/doesn't recognize. That's more than 400 albums. For these ones, I had already imported artworks manually from Google images over time and I have these pictures in a folder. Didn't want to do it manually. Plus the files in the Finder appear to have the artworks embedded!

That's here that Doug helped a lot :)

His script Re embed artwork https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxreembedartwork

was of great help. Runned it on the missing artworks and now my library is just like in the old times on iTunes

Thank you Doug

Julien

Thanks for the suggestion! At the moment, I believe I've nailed it down to Music not importing album artwork that's not embedded in the music files themselves (as in, any artwork that was retrieved via iTunes's "Get Album Artwork" menu). Why Music would explicitly ignore an iTunes feature, I can't tell you. But fortunately, I have the same music library mirrored on another Mac, which is still on Mojave, so I'm currently using some of Doug's Scripts to identify tracks without embedded artwork, and then to embed it. Then I'll copy this library over to the Catalina Mac and test it out. Hopefully that solves the problem! If not, I'll check out your solution. Sounds like a good idea!

This helped for me:

https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxreembedartwork

Applaus for the maker of this script. A big Boo to Apple because this bug in 'Music' has been there ever since Catalina came out.

it seems I wasn't alone in the nightmare for large music libraries and updating to Catalina... losing artwork.

I am truly happy to report an update to Big Sur was absolutely problem free without one piece of artwork lost.

amazing after the nightmare of re embedding artwork then re importing into library with Catalina.

good luck to you

I agree however the damage is done. The lack of proper testing resulted in the loss of years of meticulous work by myself as well as many others. I still use the music app locally on my MacBook Pro ( I Never login to my iTunes account) and I do not permit any updates to my album art. I still hope they correct the issue however I will never trust Apple with my personal music library again. I maintain an Apple Music account on a separate Windows computer with iTunes which seems to continue to work properly.

i refuse to update to Catalina let alone Big even though it tricks sometimes saying has updates to you think your curbs apps, try’s to do the upgrade, pusses me off. For mow I sticking with Mojave where ITunes is running fine. Eventually I will all library and movies. (810,000 plus songs and 400 movies). I wm tired of searching for missing tracks, missing album covers, ext. I have had to deal with 3 crashes and so on. If Apple has not fixed the music app issues by now, well apps are out there waiting for a piece of Apples Pie.