Get Album Artwork does not embed in track .m4a file

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Level 1

25 points

Get Album Artwork does not embed in track .m4a file

Hello all.

I've moved my 400GB (4,000 album) Apple Music library to an external hard drive to use with a new MacBook (both Macs running Sequoia 15.3).

I've linked the library to the external drive, and the music is fine. Unfortunately, only 50% of the album artwork is was displayed in the "Albums" view. I've confirmed that any albums/tracks where I manually added the artwork in the past is fine (the artwork is visible in the track thumbnail within the music folder on Finder).

I selected all my albums, and then selected "Get Album Artwork". The album artwork has now appeared on 90% of my albums (Apple Music listed the 170 exceptions where it could not locate the art online).

The downloaded artwork is now displayed within the Apple Music "Albums" view. However, when I go to the music folder in Finder, the downloaded artwork is not showing in the track's thumbnail (.m4a file).

Does downloaded artwork not embed in the track? If not, is there a Doug's script that will force this to occur? I'd like to resolve this with my library to prevent this from occurring on future migrations. Thank you.

Posted on Feb 8, 2025 09:38 AM

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Answer 1

FourThirty Author

Level 1

25 points

Feb 8, 2025 10:11 AM in response to turingtest2

Hi tt2,

Thank you for the quick reply and clarifying this.

I've just performed the following steps on several albums with the artwork downloaded from "Get Album Artwork" which is not embedded in tracks:

Select the album (from within the Apple Music Library "Albums" view)
Select "Song, Info..." (or CMD "I") & "Edit Items"
Click the "Artwork" tab
From the Apple Music menu, select "Edit", "Copy"
From the Apple Music menu, select "Edit", "Paste"
A green checkmark then appears in the lower right corner of the thumbnail of the Apple Music Artwork tab
Select "OK"

After performing the above steps, I can confirm the artwork then embeds in the .m4a file within the Music Media folders. I assume the artwork will now move with that album during any future migrations.

I may bite the bullet and do this manually for all of my non-embedded artwork, or perhaps explore some of the Doug's scripts that you've linked above to see if that would be more efficient.

Thank you again for your help!

FourThirty

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Feb 8, 2025 09:48 AM in response to FourThirty

Get Album Artwork associates the images with the album, populating the local artwork cache but not embedding the image. You can copy the image and paste it back into the tracks of the album, but it is a bit fiddly to do by hand for more than a couple of albums. Doug has a bunch of different scripts for managing artwork here: https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts13.php.

The obvious one would be this https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=mxreembedartwork but he has a disclaimer suggesting it isn't ideal to run it against a large selection of tracks, so you might need to look at one that saves images to each album folder, and then another that embeds any image in the album folder into each track.

tt2

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Answer 3

FourThirty Author

Level 1

25 points

Feb 19, 2025 11:48 AM in response to turingtest2

Hello tt2,

This past weekend I decided to follow your suggestion to copy the image and paste it back into the tracks of the album. I would estimate that 30% of my albums didn't have embedded artwork (which I determined by my first attempt at migrating the library to the Macbook - any albums with missing artwork following the initial migration did not have embedded artwork).

Well, after spending several hours slogging through all the albums, I can now confirm ALL the artwork migrated during the 2nd migration attempt - success!!!

I now know to manually copy/paste artwork on any future CD rips into Apple Music to avoid this in the future. Plus, I hope I never have to deal with the library container AMPArtworkAgent again...

Your advice has been invaluable. Thanks again.

FourThirty

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Answer 4

Zurarczurx

Level 4

2,568 points

Feb 19, 2025 11:57 AM in response to FourThirty

In my experience get album artwork has been broken for many years. If it does find artwork it's usually wrong and I honestly can't remember the last album that I didn't have to manually add artwork to. I still come across albums in my library which have the first track's artwork different from the rest of the album. Now you can't just cut and paste artwork it's even more of a pain.

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Answer 5

turingtest2

Level 10

277,729 points

Feb 8, 2025 10:17 AM in response to FourThirty

You're welcome. 🙂

tt2

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Get Album Artwork does not embed in track .m4a file

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