Music app on Mac only shows cover art playing the 1st song of each album

Yes, that's what is happening to me.

I have a brand new Macbook Pro M4 with Sequoia and I'm having lots of problems with embedded artwork of my ALACs and MP3s. I have all my albums with embedded covers, and when looking at the files in a Finder window (list, column and icon view) all thumbnails appear correctly.


But when I see those albums in Music app (it happens with my large external drive library but ALSO creating a brand new library and importing some of these albums) I can only view the artwork thumbnail right at the top of the Music player when I'm playing the 1st song of each album.


If I'm playing a #1 song I can see the thumbnail on the banner with the song, artist and album name. Even if I click to see the larger version, the artwork is displayed beautifully. As soon as I start playing another #1 song of another album, the artwork thumbnail changes inmediatlly. Everything works as expected if I only play the 1st song of each album. But if I change to a song that's not the 1st song of an album, the artwork thumbnail don't change and the previous song's artwork is displayed. If I click on the thumbnail to see the larger version, it appears completely black.


I tried rebuilding the artwork cache by deleting all the JPGs in the

"user/Library/Containers/com.apple.AMPArtworkAgent/Data/Documents/artwork"

folder but this doesn't help with my problem.


Please, any idea what's happening?

When I used iTunes in Monterrey (via Retroactive) all things artwork-related worked beautifully.


Many, many thanks.

Posted on Jul 25, 2025 04:11 PM

Reply
5 replies

Jul 27, 2025 03:18 AM in response to turingtest2

YES! Thanks a lot TT2.

It worked. Now the banner at the top of the screen displays the correct thumbnail for each song's cover art.


The only thing that bothers me is that when changing songs, sometimes the thumbnail changes immediately (usually for songs #1, #2, or #3 of each album), but sometimes it takes up to 10 or 12 seconds to update, and the previous song's cover art is displayed during that time.


Is this a bug or a feature? Will it continue to happen, or will it speed up in the future as the cache expands?


Cheers.

Music app on Mac only shows cover art playing the 1st song of each album

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