Where are my missing album covers?

[blackxacto]

All of my album artwork were fine, until I come in one day and they are missing.
Not the entire library, maybe a quarter of the library.
Even tunes from iTunes Store I bought have lost their album covers.
Selecting Get Album Artwork, has no effect.

19,1 iMac, macOS 10.15.6, I do not use Apple Music, or iCloud Music. Library on my internal SSD.

There are no instructions on how to rebuild the Catalina Music Library, or clear Music cache that I can find. No explanations from Apple on missing cover albums that I have found. Anyone know how to correct this in Catalina, short of manually replacing all the missing artwork?

(I also posted at Apple Forums)

 

[0128672]

There’s a discussion and a couple of solutions that worked for members here:

Solutions to missing album art in Catalina Music app?

I finally upgraded my MBP 2015 to Catalina recently after holding off for a while, largely due to the missing album art issue, and sure enough a lot of my album art is now missing. - All of the albums I added since 2016 are fine. The first albums with missing artwork I added in 2015, and as I...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[blackxacto]

There’s a discussion and a couple of solutions that worked for members here:

Solutions to missing album art in Catalina Music app?

I finally upgraded my MBP 2015 to Catalina recently after holding off for a while, largely due to the missing album art issue, and sure enough a lot of my album art is now missing. - All of the albums I added since 2016 are fine. The first albums with missing artwork I added in 2015, and as I...

forums.macrumors.com

No joy

 

[blackxacto]

Called Apple Tech support. In Catalina there is no solution, period for now, except (if purchased through iTunes Store) to delete the album to trash. Go to purchases at iTunes Store, and redownload. Of course this destroys any metadata changes such as sorting order, equalizer settings. If the album was loaded any other way Apple+I the album, and manually find and drag (paste) in a new album cover.

In Catalina, so far, there is really no quick solution. Apple says they are "working" on a solution. But it is baffling that their own Apple iTunes Store cover art does not replace from the iCloud, or even not replace when selecting Get Album Artwork.

 

[blackxacto]

Oh, about retrieving what you've already purchased from iTunes Store, so you can replace album covers Catalina Music App trashed. CLICK THE ALBUM ONCE. If you are impatient and click an album several times, you wind up downloading multiple copies of the tracks. There goes another half hour searching for and deleting multiple copies of tracks in your library. Talk about fun?

 

[Giorgio Paolucci]

Let me post here what I wrote in another thread:

I have an Itunes/Music library of over 2000 albums, so the problem was very annoying. I solved the issue by using the "Apply Embedded Artwork" script by Doug Adams (https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxapplyembeddedartwork). In Music, I selected the "Songs" view and then I sorted the songs by track number, so that all "track 1" would come first and I could easily select them all. I then ran the script. On my 2019 13'' MacBook Pro the process lasted about 3 hours and now all my album artworks are back.

 

[ryuu4dragon]

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 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...

 

[Maddcow]

@ryuu4dragon
Thank you SO much for this info! I've spent many, many hours trying to get the artwork in Big Sur Music app to show and your instructions above are the only thing that has worked for me.....and I've tried a LOT of things.

 

[ryuu4dragon]

@ryuu4dragon
Thank you SO much for this info! I've spent many, many hours trying to get the artwork in Big Sur Music app to show and your instructions above are the only thing that has worked for me.....and I've tried a LOT of things.

Thanks for the feedback and pleased to hear that it worked for you!