Where is Apple Music Artwork stored?

J

JamesMay82

macrumors 68000
Apple Music has lost all my album art again! I spent a few hours re adding it last time and it’s done it again.

I keep my library external and recently re installed the OS so I’m wondering if it’s saves albums on the internal drive? Even though it’s set to external?
 
There's a folder called "Album Artwork" inside the Music Library folder. Is your library folder on the external drive or just the music?
 
kitKAC said:
There's a folder called "Album Artwork" inside the Music Library folder. Is your library folder on the external drive or just the music?
Click to expand...
Screenshot 2023-09-22 at 18.48.00.png
 
kitKAC said:
There's a folder called "Album Artwork" inside the Music Library folder. Is your library folder on the external drive or just the music?
Click to expand...

see above post. that's all I have unfortunately. no mention of a folder called album artwork. Some artwork is there but loads are missing again. Its even missing artwork for the iTunes bought tracks!

Any ideas? I can't spend hours adding it again, its just a waste of time but it also massively pisses me off being so wrong!
 
OK, my folder is inside my legacy iTunes folder, I also have a separate Music folder like you.

Screenshot 2023-09-22 at 19.43.16.png
 
kitKAC said:
OK, my folder is inside my legacy iTunes folder, I also have a separate Music folder like you.

View attachment 2276271
Click to expand...
The good ole Days! I've found the artwork as the below. I can only assume that this is maybe my own doing by not realising the artwork file had moved and then the fresh install couldn't find it. I'm going to spend my Friday evening adding the artwork back in on a Friday night because I'm a nerd!

I presume that in future if I copy artwork files folder and then add it to same place on a fresh install it should all work properly next time.

Enter this into terminal open ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork
 
To me it seems like that library folder is a cache of all pictures that are accessed in Apple Music. In the folder on my computer it shows copies of everything I opened recently, both custom and standard artwork, including the artist images that Music uses and that I never added myself.

It seems like the custom artwork should be part of the metadata in the AAC file (I'm using mostly the AAC iTunes Plus format for my audio files) of every track of an album. To me the big questions is, why does Apple sometimes add the custom artwork to the AAC file, and sometimes I see my custom artwork in Apple Music, but it's not added to the audio file? Why not? And where is it on my drive? And why does Music behave like this?
 
MacYost said:
To me it seems like that library folder is a cache of all pictures that are accessed in Apple Music. In the folder on my computer it shows copies of everything I opened recently, both custom and standard artwork, including the artist images that Music uses and that I never added myself.

It seems like the custom artwork should be part of the metadata in the AAC file (I'm using mostly the AAC iTunes Plus format for my audio files) of every track of an album. To me the big questions is, why does Apple sometimes add the custom artwork to the AAC file, and sometimes I see my custom artwork in Apple Music, but it's not added to the audio file? Why not? And where is it on my drive? And why does Music behave like this?
Click to expand...

I recently set up a new Mac and copied in my artwork folder from the old comp to the new one and loaded it up correctly.

Here is where it’s stored.

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork

What annoys me is when I sync my
Library to my Phone or iPad it doesn’t always sync all the artwork for some reason.. any idea on that?
 
I'm sorry, but the "copy artwork cache" didn't work for me. I have a lot of custom artwork, and I learned that Apple Music sometimes adds this artwork to the audio files, and sometimes keeps it somewhere else and only "associates" it with the track in Music. No idea why this happens. Basically, when the custom artwork is not part of the audio files, it will not show up on a new computer after copying the Music Library and the audio files. At least, that is my experience after a few days of experimenting.

Further experimentation seems to show that custom artwork will always be added to the audio files if I do select all track sin an album that then use the Info dialog to add the artwork. My current workflow was to add the custom artwork to the album itself, but as said in the previous section, this will sometimes result in the artwork being added to the audio files of the album, and sometimes it jus doesn't.

Personally I have no problems with syncing artwork to my iPhone. But I do use a "manual sync" to get tracks on my iPhone:
  • I use a cable from my MacBook Pro to my iPhone.
  • I have tagged (in the Comments field) the files that I want synced with "iPhone"
  • And I'm explicitly only copying the tracks that are tagged using a playlist.
What I did notice, though, is that a change of artwork does not trigger a resync of the audio file. If I want the new artwork to appear on my iPhone, I have to remove the tag, sync (now the track will be removed from my iPhone), add the tag again, and sync again. After this, the track is back on my iPhone with the new artwork. It's tedious, but it doe the trick.
 
MacYost said:
I'm sorry, but the "copy artwork cache" didn't work for me. I have a lot of custom artwork, and I learned that Apple Music sometimes adds this artwork to the audio files, and sometimes keeps it somewhere else and only "associates" it with the track in Music. No idea why this happens. Basically, when the custom artwork is not part of the audio files, it will not show up on a new computer after copying the Music Library and the audio files. At least, that is my experience after a few days of experimenting.

Further experimentation seems to show that custom artwork will always be added to the audio files if I do select all track sin an album that then use the Info dialog to add the artwork. My current workflow was to add the custom artwork to the album itself, but as said in the previous section, this will sometimes result in the artwork being added to the audio files of the album, and sometimes it jus doesn't.

Personally I have no problems with syncing artwork to my iPhone. But I do use a "manual sync" to get tracks on my iPhone:
  • I use a cable from my MacBook Pro to my iPhone.
  • I have tagged (in the Comments field) the files that I want synced with "iPhone"
  • And I'm explicitly only copying the tracks that are tagged using a playlist.
What I did notice, though, is that a change of artwork does not trigger a resync of the audio file. If I want the new artwork to appear on my iPhone, I have to remove the tag, sync (now the track will be removed from my iPhone), add the tag again, and sync again. After this, the track is back on my iPhone with the new artwork. It's tedious, but it doe the trick.
Click to expand...

Good timing. I've just started having another look at my library 10 mins ago.

I've just removed the artwork from the album in question that doesn't sync the artwork to my phone. I've then like you said right click click, get info and added new artwork and its synced it to my phone!

I'm made up I've found the fix but now have a lot of work to do.

I guess it's how my historical libraries were saving artwork in the past and now the modern way is to embed the files perhaps?
 
MacYost said:
If you need to embed a lot of artwork, you might take a look at Doug's Scripts. It's a website full of handy Apple scripts to automate iTunes and Apple Music tasks.
Click to expand...
cheers I've just downloaded it and its doing it all now.. I'll be very impressed if it works.

when I was embedding them manually myself and I was testing it by syncing it back to the phone it duplicated all my playlists and put a 1 in front of the duplicate. I then deleted all playlists from my phone and then deleted the duplicates on my Mac and then synced and then It deleted them all from my Mac. its like it then treats the phone as the MASTER playlist record instead of the Mac.

Have you noticed this bug ?
 
I'm sorry, I never encountered that problem with playlists. But I never deleted playlist on my phone. Although I do sometimes delete the tracks if I run out of storage.
 
Thank you for starting this thread! I had the Apple Genius Bar do the data transfer from my Intel MacBook Pro running High Sierra to my new M4 Pro Mac Mini. They did a great job but there were a few glitches, mostly in Apple Music, namely:

  • Missing album artwork from iTunes.
  • The default iTunes "Recently Played" and "Top 25 Played" smart playlists no longer work and I haven't been able to fix them.
Interestingly, all the smart playlists I configured in iTunes still work fine. In addition, all the artwork I added manually since Apple couldn't find them (basically, most of the Asian and European albums I bought not sold in the US) is there. 🤷‍♂️

MacYost said:
If you need to embed a lot of artwork, you might take a look at Doug's Scripts. It's a website full of handy Apple scripts to automate iTunes and Apple Music tasks.
Click to expand...
Thanks! I'll give that a try this weekend. I have had good luck with his scripts in the past.
 
Kimba said:
Thank you for starting this thread! I had the Apple Genius Bar do the data transfer from my Intel MacBook Pro running High Sierra to my new M4 Pro Mac Mini. They did a great job but there were a few glitches, mostly in Apple Music, namely:

  • Missing album artwork from iTunes.
  • The default iTunes "Recently Played" and "Top 25 Played" smart playlists no longer work and I haven't been able to fix them.
Interestingly, all the smart playlists I configured in iTunes still work fine. In addition, all the artwork I added manually since Apple couldn't find them (basically, most of the Asian and European albums I bought not sold in the US) is there. 🤷‍♂️


Thanks! I'll give that a try this weekend. I have had good luck with his scripts in the past.
Click to expand...
I’ve just finished doing it last night. It’s better to do it in small batches otherwise it did tend to crash but did save a lot of time. Some albums it didn’t work on and I had to do manually.

It does seem to store the artwork in the library folder though as all new stuff I added was there. I’m wondering if it embeds and saves it there as well.

I guess the true test will be to move my music folder to an external and run it off a different computer and see if the artwork appears..

If yours is missing you might still need to add manually though..

I use this website for artwork as it saves trawling through google

iTunes Artwork Finder by Ben Dodson

bendodson.com bendodson.com
 
Glad to have found this thread as I've been wrestling with this issue for a couple of days. I recently did a clean install of Sequoia and migrated my Apple Music (iTunes) library by copying the entire Music folder from a backup. All the music transferred, but no artwork. I made custom artwork for 80% of what's in the library, so this was a bit disconcerting.

I was able to find most of the artwork in the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork folder, so I copied that over from the backup. The artwork still did not show, but I found if I briefly played each file, the artwork would appear. Sometimes, I'd have to click play twice before it showed up.

There are still many that are missing though, some from songs I purchased from Apple, others are WAVs that I imported. I can understand why the WAV artwork is missing, but I'd like to understand WHERE this artwork is stored. Trying to reverse-engineer this has given me an Excedrin headache!
 
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