album artwork in Catalina Music

iMac on 10.15.5

Allow me to chime in - this drove me nuts, my "old" iTunes Library was in pristine shape, when migrating to Music zero artwork showed up.

These two options worked for me:

1. Open the Apple Music app whilst holding down the "Option" key, chose a Library & find your last available (or whichever you want to use) iTunes Library File (*.itl) on your system. When selected, Music will ask you to give a name to this Library, which will then be saved & stored under your "Music" folder in Catalina. I used "Last iTunes Library", just pick whatever name works for you. Then let Apple Music do it's thing. I have 400GB worth of music, it took a little while and eventually all artwork reappeared.
2. Download Retroactive and re-install iTunes :-)

After a lot of time spent, here is my solution :

1. If tou trust it, download "Re-Embed Artwork" on dougscripts.com
2. Install it with the instructions in dmg
3. Open Music and select "Songs" view
4. Sort songs by title
5. Select 400 firsts songs (don't work for me with more than 400)
6. Close all others apps because you want this script to work at his best, you don't want you album art to be missed or whatever
7. Open the downloaded script from menu bar in Music (if you correctly installed it) and let it do his work
8. Repeat 400 songs at a time, until you did all songs
9. Optionnal : download "Tracks Without Embedded Artwork" from the same site, select songs to see if eventually the previous script failed somewhere and removed one of your cover. You can select all your songs, but for free it will detect 20 missing art max. Which is enough for me.

I was able to solve this (while moving to a new computer) by copying ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents from the old computer to the new computer.

Fixes the TV app as well!

I just upgraded to BigSur from Catalina with a clean install, and experienced the same issues with missing artwork when loading my library stored on an external drive. Here's are the results of my experimentation:

• Files with embedded artwork eventually get fixed by interacting with the Music UI for the song / album / artist. I have tested this by watching the artwork cache folder found at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork whilst scrolling playlists and playing songs.
• At some point this image caching process stalls completely, and if you quit and reopen Music app you will see a bunch more images flood in to the cache immediately on load from whatever queue / process they are stuck in.
• Seeminlgy most (not sure if all in my case) iTunes purchases with missing artwork get fixed by File > Library > Get Album Artwork. This scares me since I don't trust apple to touch any of my non-purchased songs given my PTSD from trying iTunes Match years ago.
• If you "leave it" as people suggest, often nothing happens. Music App and the AMPArtworkAgent process can be burning 100% cpu for hours on end but nothing is actually happening.

This is definitely a serious bug. This artwork caching should happen in a matter of minutes if not seconds, and shouldnt require constant quitting / interaction. Just having Music open with nothing playing is causing my fans to pump full throttle on my 6 core Mac Mini, which has literally never happened before and I work non-stop with multiple heavy apps open for design / development work all day.

Apple Music is broken people, even if they won't admit it.

Further to the above, the quickest way I have found to force artwork caching or whatever the f*^$% is going on is:

Create two smart playlists, one with the rule "Album Artwork is false" another with the rule "Album Artwork is true".

Set each to "Songs" view and play around with the sort by playlist number (arrow above the song numbers on far left of the columns header). For whatever illogical reason songs that don't have artwork previews loaded (but do have embedded artwork) in the "Artwork True" playlist get grouped to one end when sorted by number, and the same is true in the "Artwork False" playlist, which will soon have songs with artwork (bear with me).

Now switch to "Playlist" view for both playlists, so you get a song list with artwork previews on the left. In the "Artwork True" playlist, scroll the list to the section where all the songs without artwork generated are grouped (you will see they all have grey artwork boxes) and stay in one place. You will soon notice the list refresh and the songs that were in view have been moved out of the playlist. You can just leave the view in one place as more songs without artwork get loaded into the into view and then get moved out out the playlist.

At some point you can switch over to the "Artwork False" playlist. Now the songs in this playlist that do actually have embedded artwork will do the same thing and slowly load their artwork and get removed from the playlist. It helps to play a few songs to check that you are at the correct end, you will notice the songs have no preview in the playlist view, but in the player up the top they do have artwork.

Crazy and confusing I know, but it does actually work. This is how broken the Music app is, and it makes me quite sad because i have spent a lot of time keeping my library organised and this kind of thing makes me think Apple doesn't care about me as a user.

Try to use Doug’s AppleScripts. There is one called “Apply Embedded Artwork” it’s a workaround for a bug after migrating from iTunes bug.

Sorry to hear others are having problems with album art. I know the feeling, as I went through this a few years back with legacy iTunes as I was trying to meticulously clean up metadata in my iTunes music library -- at the time, I had months of problems with iTunes replacing my carefully curated album art, that were compounded by the original iTunes Match process, which Apple Support wasn't able to completely resolve, but I finally figured-out. Anyway, more of my observations:

(The new) Music App appears to be rebuilding an equivalent "Album Artwork subfolder" like we've known forever with iTunes, by re-reading metadata from each track, then depending on Preferences Setting, downloading missing album artwork that it has in Apple Music or the iTunes Store in the cloud. I have yet to find where Music is placing this data as it's not in the same folder with the apparent new Music index file (e.g. user/Music/Music or equivalent) or where your actual media folder is located.

I don't forgive Apple with migration issues anyone is having, but in an effort to help others here, there are a lot of variables that may be the culprit, so in case others want to compare, here's my situation that seemingly made it through the album artwork migration process:

• I know that nearly every one of my 28K tracks have embedded metadata with JPG or PNG album art as the single Front Cover within the ID3 album art tag. Size varies up to perhaps 1500x1500 or more in some cases, but it's all over the map.
• Perhaps 85% my 28K tracks are M4A Apple Lossless (manually ripped from my CD collection, with hand curated meta including album art), nearly all the rest are 256K AAC from the iTunes Store, with a couple handfuls of miscellaneous others.
• I have both iTunes Match and Apple Music enabled with the Music App. (Apple Music expires later this week -- at least for now.)
• I keep the Preferences Setting to use Apple's Album Art OFF. I found with legacy iTunes it would unexpectedly replace my album art with Apple's version -- which is not what I want to happen; I only want Apple's Art to be used if my metadata for some reason does not include it.

I still suspect people having problems with this:

1. May not be waiting for the process to complete. It took more than 12 hours for my 28K tracks to be read and process on a 3.6GHz 8-core i9 iMac with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity to my Drobo where the 500GB of music data is located. Eventually all my tracks have album art displaying in the Music App interface once again.
2. You have a different type or combination of artwork that is/is not imbedded in track meta, along with perhaps a different album art preferences setting that influences this. For album art not showing up, if you have a metadata tag editor (I use Metadatics amongst others), have you looked at the source track to determine if it has imbedded album art and if so, what are it's characteristics? If it does not show up in the metadata, what is your iTunes/Music preferences setting to bring in new album art from the cloud?

It might be useful for others having problems to try and be a bit more specific if they can.

It's likely a red herring and not related to this Catalina Album Artwork thread so I don't want to take us off-track, but just-in-case: After completing the initial migration to the new Music App, I have 123 tracks (of my ~28K) that have "missing files". I have been working to resolve what happened and how to get them back for the past two days. I'm currently in process of having the Music App rebuild everything as a new library by having first signed-out of Music (so there was no iTunes Match/Apple Music in the way), started the migration which as reported elsewhere brought back album art within minutes compared to the first time (so they are being cached somewhere), and I'm now beyond 16 hours of the iTunes Match/Apple Music process checking each and every track against my formerly matched cloud versions. Of interest to me is I caught multiple process threads hitting CPU during this time, giving me the impression the Album Artwork build is done in parallel with the Cloud Matching process -- and I suspect I may have screwed things up the first time when I tried to "consolidate" to a new location outside the old iTunes Media folder while the Match process was going on. IDK, but time will tell. Again, this non-album-art anomaly is likely a red herring and off-topic for this thread.

Good luck to everyone

The process of loading artwork with a large library will make the Music app use more and more memory until it eventually crashes. It seems to be worse with libraries that are mostly ripped and not downloaded. With mine, it eventually finished after a day or so and then everything seemed to work okay.

One thing that seemed to help was to create a Smart Playlist with the rule "Album Artwork" "is false". That gave me a playlist of all the songs that was missing cover art. Then you can click Show Album in library and manually fix the cover art. I had a lot of albums where just one or two songs was missing album art. It's a long, tedious process but eventually I got all my album art assigned.

Just found a quick workaround. If you don't mind lose your play counts (or may be other activity data of your play habits), you can just delete them from Music app and add them again, and the album arts come back again. Otherwise you may want to wait for Apple to fix the bug.

This is not a reply, per se, but a further observation. I too have a 4,000+ album collection, and every single track has full embedded album art. The art from the "legacy" albums that were already in iTunes before the Catalina upgrade does nbot appear in the new Apple Music. Not one out of the 4,000+. But if I delete an album and re-import it, the art appears. If I ask Apple Music to "find" album art, it is not able to find any. This doesn't surprise me ... none of my music library comes from Apple.

This tells me that when you import an album (or just a single track, I imagine), Apple Music looks at the track's internal metadata for album art, and uses it if it finds any. However, during the conversion process, I believe it does not look at the internal metadata, and only searches its own Apple Music store.

Can this be a simple matter of ineptness on the part of Apple's software team? After all, there are a number of other examples of rather obvious carelessness in the way Catalina's Apple Music presents itself in comparison with iTunes that, quite clearly, it not so much attempts to replace as replicate. Or is it evidence of a deliberate strategy to 'persuade' its customers not to obtain their music from other sources?

Sounds like a lot of work that should not be necessary. That is why I gave up and just created a new Music Library in Catalina and imported all of the previous iTunes media folder (which had all the artwork embedded) into the Music App and I got 100% of the album art and I have a large library. I know you lose all the playlists and other data however that doesn't bother me as long as I have all of my original Albums and Artwork.

In my opinion the Music App still has problems and lost features such as the option to display artwork in Songs view that need to be addressed and will hopefully undergo more updates in future releases of Catalina so I would make sure all of your artwork is embedded and that you have a backup of the Music App media folder just in case. I have too much time invested in high quality artwork, a lot of which I restored to lose it to what apple thinks is the correct artwork for my music.

Hi, I don't know if this has been solved but I've found a solution which works. By creating an AAC version of the file (File -> Convert), the embedded artwork shows in iTunes (now Music). I know this can be a bit tedious if you have to sort through your entire library, however, it does work.

Hope this helps!

Pudge2019 wrote:

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'd be willing to bet that all your embedded artwork is still there. Apple's automatic "Get Album Artwork feature places the artwork it (often incorrectly) deems appropriate in a separate artwork database in the user library. Embedded artwork is only changed if applying a new image in the "Get Info -> Artwork" tab.

In the likely event that your embedded artwork is all still there, you can try Doug's Apply Embedded Artwork script mentioned earlier and it should mostly come back to life - although this is still limited to only a few albums at a time, so not a perfect solution for those of us with large libraries. But, until Apple comes out with a fix, it's better than nothing...

Correct: Doug's Re-Embed Artwork Script is the best current solution

It's currently at version 3.1 updated August 25, 2020 for those of you who installed a version before that.

I finally got a reply from Doug after asking him what his script is doing to the artwork such that file sizes are sometimes the same after running it, but often times smaller and sometimes larger.

He said he had no idea.

Which seems... odd... but I put this out there to ask others who are pedantic and have used the script, to let me know what their experience has been.

Are your file sizes changing after running it?

Are you noticing any size or quality changes to your embedded artwork?

Also: for those looking for an iTunes alternative, the best solution by far that I've found is to run your own Plex server and then use the excellent PlexAmp app for playback on your devices.

Yes, this requires running a server, which might be a non-starter for most people (Plex is super easy to use, but not everyone has an always-on/always-connected Mac to dedicate to this) and, yes, you'll need to invest in a Plexpass, but the experience is really fantastic now (I bought a lifetime pass ages ago for about $80).

All the keyboard shortcuts you'd want are built-in to the Mac app (including star ratings!) and once you get used to the unconventional UI you might decide like I have that it's really quite clever. Or you can have a more typical experience using your Web browser for Plex.

The iOS version of Plexamp is excellent, as well. If you don't like it, there are many other media players (like Prism for iOS) that can also hook in to your Plex server.

And, best of all, you have native FLAC support with Plex, which ends up making iTunes seem like a music player for elementary schoolers, which seems to be Apple's target demographic for the UX of most of its services now.

The one downside to Plex is that while it can import iTunes playlists, it doesn't seem to properly migrate star ratings (search Google for more about this). I haven't done a deep dive to figure this one out yet, though.

Here is the solution that worked for me (after two over-night time-machine efforts at restore failed and a lengthy Migration Assistant attempt was aborted).

Pre-requisite:

—a fully up-to-date and functional backup (I used a recent time-machine backup with the Music library "organized" and complete with cover art—much of it custom installed).

—also, set Finder > Preferences > Advanced to "Show all filename extensions".

Steps:

1. Open Music and from "Account" menu select "Sign out".
2. Quit Music application.
3. In Finder, navigate to the Music folder: select all contents ("Command-key + A") and empty to trash ("Command-key + Delete").
4. Re-start computer.
5. Open Music and now "Sign in" to your account. All purchases and downloads should appear, complete with art work (if not visible, go to "View" menu and select "Downloaded music").
6. In Finder, navigate to your backup folder—not by TimeMachine (TM) but in Finder—and locate the file with the ".backupbundle" extension (or sparse.bundle) that contains your backup. I used a Thunderbolt cable connection to my backup drive, which is super fast and likely more stable than wifi connections. 
7. Mount the backupbundle file containing your backup: either highlight file, then "Control-key + click" and select "Open With > DiskImageMounter.app"; or Force-click the file and click the "Mount" button in pop-up panel. 
8. The backupbundle should appear as a drive in Finder with folder labelled "Backups.backupdb", or similar. (!!NOTE!!: Do NOT fiddle with the TM files/folders from Finder—you will only copy what you need later. TM files should only be manipulated from in the TM app itself).
9. Back to the Music application: now go to File menu and select "Import" (or more efficiently, "Command-key + O").
10. Navigate to the backupbundle image, then make your way through several nested folders to the "Users > "YourName"User > Music" folder.
11. There could be several nested folders labelled "Music"; go to the final "Music" folder with the "Media" folder and select all ("Command-key + A"), then click "Open".

Within minutes I had my entire library with 100% of its cover art ready for action!

Hope this is helpful...