Apple Music AMPArtworkAgent is eating up CPU

[svanstrom]

I was wondering why my MBP16 was under heavier load than it should be; warm to the touch, fans going.

Usually this means that it is background processing photos, because not even Plex manages this constant load (at least not without it transcoding something).

So I track down the culprit, which turns out to be that I left the Music app open, without playing music, in a currently hidden space (virtual display).

Seriously? Did Apple like hide a bitcoin miner in that thing? ?

How the heck does an app I occasionally use for radio streaming only constantly require this heavy load (every now and then going up over 100%)?

In the past I've just used this on my iPhone/watch, so I haven't come across this problem before; but a quick websearch tells me it's not exactly a new problem.

I have of course all the latest updates, and I've also made sure that Music isn't supposed to automatically update artwork.

 

[Zoom]

I'm seeing the same thing on my M1 Mac mini. It has plenty of CPU to deal with it, but it still bothers me a lot. I find that artwork takes a few second to load on the mini player when the song changes. (I've read elsewhere that this is more of an issue when mini player than with regular app window.)

 

[Sysmet]

Same problem here. Mac mini M1.

AMPArtworkAgent process wrote to disk 130GB during a day and Music.app is top energy consumer in Activity Monitor.
Don't know if it matters, but player was in mini mode.

Music was not played at all, and I don't even have a music library to update.