album artwork in Catalina Music

Tom, in your process where some albums had cover art for one or two songs. You can, "get album info" and if the artwork shows up in the artwork tab there you can drag it slightly and re-drop it to copy that art to all of the songs. That seems to work if the first song on the album has the art, if it is a later song you need to, "get song info" and copy that art, then go back to "get album info" and paste the art for all of the songs.

Either way this has been an absolute disaster of a transition for Apple's faithful iTunes customers who aren't bought into the subscription based Music model. We will continue to be thought of last going forward as we are not a constant revenue stream. I hope Apple considers the impact of how releasing us from that tie into the overall Apple ecosystem could affect the customer base for all other things apple going forward. Although we will continue to be a smaller and smaller group of die hard fans.

I know I was hooked into the apple ecosystem with the first iPod, and that connection via iTunes consequently led to purchases of around 10 mac computers, full home airport networking in numerous homes, dozens of @TVs, iPhones and iPads from the first models of each onward.

Given the shift of focus to all subscription based value, and the erosion of the, "it just works" tenant I will slowly become less bought in.

Hopefully someone sees these threads and provides some transparency surrounding future fixes, and when we can successfully transition from Mojave and iTunes to Catalina and Music without the massive technical debt created by the cover art debacle, and memory leaks...

Otherwise we are left guessing.

Yes, as I mentioned, no matter if the artwork is embedded in the file itself. Music app shows what is in its database in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/.

Pasting again the artwork, you are forcing the application to copy the artwork in that database.

This is technically a non sense or just a way to link te music folders to a single user. That database should be just eliminated by Apple. Artworks and other additional non user related informations should be self contained in the music folders/files. User related information, as stars, number of executions... etc, can be, (must be) of course, located in the user home, but media data absolutely not. Otherwise it will never be consistent and therefore always buggy.

Solution (as I already mentioned): forget Music app, it is hopeless. If you really need to update to Catalina, reenable iTunes by means of "Retroactive" to run on Catalina. It is an application that patches iTunes that, on Catalina, was killed by Apple.

I had the same issue and the Apply Embedded Artwork script did nadda. I was also having terrible performance issues such as agonizingly slow searching/filtering/navigation, mouse clicks disappearing, interminable waits for song previews in the iTunes Store, home sharing not showing artwork, etc... In frustration, I finally nuked my entire library and had Music rebuild it from scratch (68,000 tracks, all with correct artwork embedded, no Apple Music, no iCloud library, no check for artwork enabled). The rebuild solved the performance problems, and embedded artwork showed up perfectly for every MP3 track and every non-purchased AAC track. However, for purchased AAC files, the correct embedded artwork showed up in the Music track info dialogs but about 2/3 of the albums displayed no artwork in album view or anyplace else and multiple tracks were displaying iTunes store artwork instead of the correct embedded artwork. Also, none of the purchased tracks were using embedded metadata (artist/title corrections, sorting, etc..) and were instead using/displaying the original iTunes store metadata. I had to use Doug's Refresh from Metadata script to get Music to use the embedded metadata for every single purchased track. I laboriously re-embedded all the artwork for purchased tracks using Music over a period of several days, and everything was perfect--all artwork present, embedded and displaying in all views and players. I launched Music yesterday less than 48 hours after I finished fixing the artwork, and nearly 200 purchased albums have spontaneously reverted to displaying no artwork again! The embedded artwork is still there, but Music refuses to display it. The only way I can get it to display is manually embed again. This is beyond madness.

The Apply Embedded Artwork script solution does not work for me, and this is the reason I jumped on this thread in the first place. As a matter of fact, I discovered the script on my own as I became increasingly frustrated with Music, determined it was not working, and scoured the web for any remarks about it when I came across this discussion thread. In my instance, the Apply Embedded Artwork Script does exactly nothing, and the check for embedded artwork script correctly determines that I have no tracks with missing embedded artwork. Even a full rebuild of my Library did not correctly apply embedded artwork in my case, and the script has been of no help afterward, either. (I will note that many of Doug's other scripts are quite handy and worth the nominal $$, but not this one). My post-rebuild issues at first seemed to be limited to purchased AAC tracks from the iTunes Store, but I'm gradually discovering random non-purchased AAC/MP3 as I re-create playlists--sometimes tracks that won't display their artwork and sometimes playlists that won't display an album cover even though every track in the album has a thumbnail. I'm having to manually re-embed, sometimes multiple times, to get artwork to stick and show up everywhere it's supposed to. Even then, there seems to be no guarantee that fixes any given track/album permanently.

Also, while it seems that there are a number of different "scenarios" for people here, there is absolutely a common theme throughout. Usage of different features (iCloud library, Apple Music subscription, syncing to iOS, Home Sharing) exposes different aspects of this, as does having collections of differing sizes and mixes of file types. In a nutshell, album artwork handling in Music is (still) completely borked. IMHO, the artwork database and caching mechanisms are very likely a big part of what's broken, and it's terrible this is so opaque to the user. Even the Apple Developer documentation provides no clues about how this is supposed to work.

demenchuk wrote:

On a video I show an easy way to recover album artworks. If you find how to automate it, please let me know.

https://youtu.be/kSFqWg8oevM

Doug's script mentioned above automates exactly this process; however, it doesn't seem to work on all tracks yet for some reason. But still work giving it a try!

Billy,

I agree. I had a similar situation with almost 200,000 tracks. I had the same artwork problems until I unchecked "Automatically Update Artwork" and disabled "iTunes Store" and did not sync with iTunes Match etc. essentially making the Music App a local only application. I did not discover all this until it was too late. Luckily I had a backup so I started all over from scratch and imported all of my music into Catalina and managed to save most of my artwork. I had hundreds of tracks with more than one image ( Front, Back etc ). I discovered that on some of the tracks at least , the artwork is still there however there is no way to view any of them except the one in the foreground since sideways movement is gone. I really miss the Artwork in the songs view but am thankful that Column Browser has been returned.

Now that I finally got Music to work for me somewhat I found another surprise. While Music does still permit multiple libraries this feature is now worthless to me as it only allows one location for tracks to be stored. So if you have three libraries all of the tracks are stored in the same location. If you change the Music Media location for the second library and import music it will go there however as soon as you close the library and open up your first library it changes the Media location of the second library back to the same location as the first.

it is obvious that either the application was not tested properly or they intended for it to be the way. Had I know what I know now I would never had upgraded to Catalina. I Still have an old Mac mini with High Sierra where I keep multiple libraries including my Apple Music/iTunes Match library. It has become a real pain. I have considered trying to sync the second Music Library to my Apple Music/iTunes Match and not storing any of the tracks locally which should work however I have not gotten the nerve to try it. I fear that it will try and also sync my first and main library and really mess things up.

Roger

My remedy worked worked fine, I rolled back my Mac to Mojave with the old iTunes. At least I know that everything is intact. Everything restored perfectly using TineMachine. Ill wait to see if Apple tackles any of the posted issues.,, I highly doubt it not for a while.

@Pudge2019: Have started using Clementine music player here. It is not as polished UI wise as the music app is. But the good think is, it works. And it even plays flac file format. And for anybody planing to transition away from macOS: it is cross plattform and you do not suffer any lock-in syndrome.

Hope they can fine some UI dev to help them improve on that as well.

You can find the latest releases here: https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine/releases

Their website has not been updated in a long time and as there has not been a stable release in years, the releases listed on GitHub are more reliable than the old v1.3.1 build from their website.

STOP writing that you have the same problem, guys! Go to the Feedback Page instead and report it as a bug!

here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/apple-music.html

here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Appreciate the note. I tried Doug Scripts weeks back to no avail.

I also tried launching a new version of iTunes (or Apple Music; whatever they want to call it now).

I dragged in the two albums I'm having issue with, created playlists and there was no problem. All relevant artwork was on the song and the playlists.

Someone else mentioned I might have too many playlists—so I deleted a few dozen old ones (on my current Mac and set-up). No fix. Same issues.

I have decided to bite the bullet and rebuild my music from scratch. That is really the only answer here with my new MacBook. I don't need some iTunes / Apple Music hybrid now that iTunes has been killed off.

I exported a few hundred playlists that I want to keep and I'll now dedicate a dozen hours (to something I've already poured hundreds hours into over the years.)

At the end of the day, shame on Apple for not caring about the long-time music lovers who don't want to deal with their streaming service. A lot of folks still rely on ripping CDs or managing a music catalog full of physical music, creating their own playlists and enjoying music that way. (SONOS did something similar with their bunk software, which was too fragile to let user play music stored on their phone—streaming services truly the only option to listen to any music on SONOS without any drop-off.)

The whole thing sucks, but it's where we've landed so we'll deal with it.

Not sure how much longer I'll be an Apple loyalist as there have been too many setbacks like this over the years. Growing really tired of it.

Appreciate the detailed notes. Thank you for taking the time.

Days back I decided to bite the bullet and just rebuild Music from scratch.

Exported about 200+ playlists and just started dragging songs into a fresh new version of Apple Music and will dump my old iTunes once complete.

Probably put about 10 hours in already and barely are the letter "D". Great waste of my time and life thanks to Apple's destruction of iTunes (in order to force more people to stream Apple Music), but it is what it is.

I was wasting just as much time on message boards and YouTube trying to solve an unsolvable problem. The only way to rectify things was a clean start (as even trying to bring over an old iTunes file or new Apple Music file was still problematic.)

Thanks for nothing, Apple—but thanks to all on this thread who have graciously offered their time and wisdom to help this lame problem I'm dealing with.

Well, the embedded artwork thing did the trick.

For anybody holding back on Mojave because of this, you can use one of Doug's Scripts to build a playlist of all the tracks which don't actually have their artwork embedded in the file itself, and then use another script to go through all of those tracks, take the linked artwork, and actually embed it into the actual track. Once you do this, you should be able to upgrade your macOS and the new Music app will respect your album art.

this script seems to solve the issue: https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxapplyembeddedartwork

I didn't have problems with movies as they migrated to the new TV app. Art eventually appeared -- I assume it just took some time for the app to scan my near 31K movies and TV episodes. I suspect it took even longer because MUSIC was doing the same thing at the time so I likely had CPU and I/O constraints against the same device.

Apple should have probably put in a status message and shown it in Activity (like they do with music matching) while these background processes are executing -- it may only take minutes to complete for a user with a few tracks/movies, but for some of us with large libraries, it takes hours or perhaps days for the fastest processors to accomplish.