Convert Mojave-age iTunes.itl library on external drive to Monterey Music .musiclibrary

Hi there!

I spent a week variously playing different tracks, or deleting the album artwork cache to see if I could force Music to load embedded artworks. No love there. The embedded art always appeared at the top play bar thumbnail, but never in the main browser / viewer.

I finally decided that the key might be having the media (with their embedded art) available during the initial .itl --> .musiclibrary conversion that I did on a work machine running Big Sur. I cleared off a travel-friendly large capacity external drive and copied my entire legacy iTunes media library, including all music files, to that. Then I took that in to the Big Sur machine to re-make the library fresh from the iTunes one.

This was key! Having the media files present when you option+click Music to load the .itl library meant that at library conversion, Music (slowly) loaded all embedded artwork present in the music files. This took some significant time. Every single track of mine has manually-embedded artwork ... so I wasn't missing a single album cover. I suspect that some users might see patchiness in the return of album artwork if they had tracks lacking properly embedded images.

Once Music finished loading all artworks, I made sure to copy the artwork cache it built back to my external drive to transfer to my own machine. (~/Library/Containers/ ... /Data/Documents). This included the artwork folder and the SQL files associated with it. Loaded the new .musiclibrary file onto my home external drive, dropped the artwork cache in its home in ~/Library, opened the library .. and voila! Completely re-built library including artworks.

My last question regarding Music app: will adding album covers via Get Info --> Artwork still embed album art in the track? Or will this just put a .jpg in the artwork cache and no longer properly embed to the file?

Thanks for your input!

I should note, my issue is identical to this user's issue: Help, moving iTunes library from Mojave t… - Apple Community

And there hasn't seem to have been a resolution beyond attempting to do the conversion with an older .itl library file. I have a whole slew of older .itl files in my "Previous iTunes libraries" ... none of which will convert.

Hi folks,

I successfully got my iTunes library read into Monterey Music following the suggestion by JRN on this thread:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254093986

Briefly: I have access to a machine running Big Sur at work. I brought my .itl over on a thumb drive, and directed the Music app on that machine to open the .itl database via OPTION+ click. Music on Big Sur was able to bring in my database (minus album art) but maintaining key data like play counts. I then transferred the Big Sur created .musiclibrary database back to my external drive, transferred the music files to the appropriate /Music/Media/Music file structure, and voila.

Any suggestions on replacing the lost album art? iTunes file structure for storing Id3 tag art is a bit opaque, so I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this.

Thank you! Any clue which iTunes files Music will point to when extracting the album art?

I suspect that since I only had Music convert the .itl file (since it's not my machine), it was missing access to those cached artworks. Perhaps the solution would have been to bring my external drive in and point Big Sur to the whole shebang.

So I suppose I'm asking - think there's any way to point Music to those now (after creation of the new .musiclibrary db) for extraction?

Ah! I see. Actually, 100% of my album artwork was manually embedded by me, originally. And this new .musiclibrary db was created without access to the media. Perhaps if I delete this cache, now that the db has the right links to the media, it will reevaluate. I'll give it a shot. Thanks. Will report back.

Removing that cache doesn't seem to force Music to do anything, as far as I can tell. I removed:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.APMArtworkAgent/Data/Documents

from the directory. Closed and restarted Music. No love. Also closed Music, swapped libraries, then closed and swapped back. Not sure what process beyond opening the app would force the embedded art scraping...

Note: I do not have the option "automatically update artwork for imported songs" checked, as I'm deathly afraid this would give Music the go-ahead to change my manually curated album art.