How to have a reasonable chance at getting correct album art in Mac OS Apple Music

TL;DR

Ignore the naysayers who claim it has nothing to do with the iTunes music store—they are wrong. Look up the album in iTunes and set the album title for your local files to the exact same title, with junk like “(Remaster)” and so on included. Then clear the artwork and download it again. Afterwards, you can rename the album back to what you want. If this doesn't work, then it will never work for that album, so stop wasting your time.

The Long Story

I still use Apple Music, the former iTunes, to manage an offline music library. I have never bought into the streaming game. It sucks for many reasons that I won't explain here. What also sucks, is how Apple Music handles album art, especially for music that has been ripped from CDs or obtained from somewhere else than the iTunes store. Very often, the album art is plain wrong. It will generally be from the correct artist, but older albums will often get the cover art of a very recent release, or a stupid compilation. I don't care about compilations, I want to know what album a song originally came from.

The cover art matching algorithm has always been bad, from the earlier days of iTunes to the latest Music app release in Mac OS Sonoma. The way in which it makes mistakes has changed over the years, but it has never made any sense. I would like to have a chat with the person who implemented it. I wonder how their mind works—if it works at all. Anyone with some vague sense of logic and a bit of programming experience can come up with a better algorithm than the current one.

And please don't tell me to add my own cover art by pasting it into the info window. Ever since it was first introduced in ID3 tags, I have hated this concept of copy-pasting the same JPEG or PNG file into the metadata tags of every single track of an album. What if I have an album with 50 tracks? Do I really need to duplicate the same image 50 times? That is conceptually idiotic. Album art should be stored once and then linked to the relevant tracks. It does not belong inside the music files themselves. This is one upside from how the artwork download system in iTunes/Music handles it, because it does exactly that: download a single file and then link it to each track. Now if only it would download the correct file…

Anyhow, I'll stop my rant and cut straight to the chase. How can one fix missing or incorrectly matched artwork even when you know the album is in the iTunes music store? After some experiments, I have found a way to fix some of the blatantly wrong album covers. For instance, practically all my Dire Straits albums got the same cover of some recent Mark Knopfler compilation with a red Stratocaster on a blue background. When using the “Show in iTunes Store” option on songs from those albums, it will indeed always send me to that compilation album in iTunes. However, the actual correct albums are also in the store. However, they will often be remasters, or “bonus track editions.” The title of the album in the store is for instance “Communiqué (Remastered),” while in my collection it is simply called “Communiqué” (because I care as much about what particular remaster a track came from as I care about compilations—I don't give a 💩.)

Therefore, despite many people claiming that the cover art matching has nothing to do with the iTunes store, I decided to clear the wrong artwork, rename the album to “Communiqué (Remastered),” and try to download the cover art again. And behold, it works. (Of course afterwards I restored the original album name.) The same worked for Neko Case - “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” which I had to rename to the silly “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Bonus Track Edition)” because that is the version which is available in the iTunes store.

The bad news is that this does not always work. For the Belgian band dEUS, it is totally hopeless. The matching algorithm gets stuck on linking all albums to Following Sea. I have no clue why. Again, I'd like to see the implementation of this “algorithm”—I really could use a good laugh. How can it be so bad? How can it break on stuff between brackets? Anyone who takes a quick glance at album naming should know that if something doesn't match exactly, but it does match when omitting stuff between brackets, it is likely a good match. And what about just giving the user the option to pick the correct match from multiple options if there is ambiguity? Oh no, that is totally un-Apple of course, because everything needs to be dumb and simple. Apple expects all their users to be dumb and simple.

It is rather obvious that Apple doesn't care about the ever shrinking niche of users who want to manage their own music library. This fares against their streaming income model. I even suspect this is why they subtly break functionality in the Music app, or refuse to fix bugs, like the failure to update the last played status in many cases, or the hiccups that make the whole Mac OS choke every 7 seconds when playing music on older Intel machines—see my older blog post about this.

Anyhow, if you are as masochistic as me and want to stick to the Music app to manage an offline music collection, now you have at least some chance to fix some of your broken artwork. However, it is likely I will not only ditch the Music app for something else, but the whole Apple ecosystem in the near future, because I have figured out that I have switched to open source alternatives for pretty much everything lately. Ironically, iTunes/Music was one of the few remaining things that I liked and kept me on the platform, but since they are now also enshittifying this, it leaves me with no real reason to stick with MacOS…

The Music app in Mac OS 14 Sonoma causes pauses in the whole rest of the system

TL;DR: if you encounter hiccups in the MacOS UI or general sluggishness while playing music, first of all upgrade to Sonoma 14.5 if you can, because this bug seems to be solved REDUCED in that version. The bug will still occur after a while though. To avoid it, close the Music app window, OR open any program that uses 3D acceleration of any kind, OR disable automatic graphics switching in System Settings. it will make the hiccups magically vanish.

My MacBook Pro “upgraded” itself to Mac OS Sonoma during a routine reboot, without my consent. This wouldn't be that bad if this new release of the OS would not be riddled with bugs. One apparent bug was that when the Music app starts playing the next track, and the display is sleeping, there would only be an empty notification temporarily waking the screen, with nothing else in it than the Music icon and the word “Music”. In previous releases this would show full song information as expected. Eventually I figured out that this is a ‘feature’: one needs to give the Music app explicit permission to show information on a “locked” screen, even though the screen is not actually locked in my case. Why it is then still allowed to show a pointless empty notification, beats me. Apple is starting to adopt Microsoft style logic.

Anyhow, on to the true bug that is the main topic of this post, and it is a bad one. It is quite simple:

• Playing local M4A or MP3 files will cause the whole system UI to freeze during about 1 second, approximately every 7 seconds. EXCEPT the Music app itself, which somehow remains immune against theze hiccups. Otherwise you will notice this by things momentarily hanging while scrolling, typing, or doing anything else that requires smooth updating of the screen (even video playback will stutter).
• Playing an internet radio stream will cause same UI freezes, but only when the metadata in the stream causes the status display in the Music app to change. For instance, if the stream contains artist and title information, you can expect everything to choke at the start of every new song. Somehow I have a knack for finding these weird correlations, I don't know why, but it only took about 4 occurrences to figure this out, then I confirmed it by doing some explicit tests.
• These nuisances only occur if the Music app window is open. Close it and the hiccups no longer occur. Of course I mean closing only the window, not quitting the whole app (which would obviously fix any problems caused by the app running).

I don't even know what could cause this. The days when playing an MP3 file required almost all CPU resources of a machine, are way behind us (I still remember one of my friends boasting about this with his 4/86). This seems like some kind of real-time priorities problem, or some UI rendering bug. The 14.3 update mentioned something about a performance problem with UI rendering, but alas, it definitely did not fix this bug because I still encounter it in Sonoma 14.3.1.
I bet it has something to do with all the unwanted security and privacy junk that is being poured into the OS, I wish there was just a big master toggle switch in the control panel “I am not an idiot, don't lock down my computer” to disable all this stuff.

How this kind of bug can have slipped through QA, is beyond me. I guess they don't really test playing local files anymore, assuming everyone will be happy to move to stupid streaming services that produce a steady revenue and that can be manipulated at leisure. However, I find reports in many places of Sonoma being sluggish and unresponsive, and I suspect that the Music app is not the only one causing this. It must be some deeper-level problem of which this is only one manifestation.

Update 2024/03/23: this is definitely some kind of rendering problem.

After some more experimenting, I found out that leaving certain other apps open, will also avoid the problem, even if the Music app window is visible while it is playing music. The magic apps that avoid the problem, are the ones that use OpenGL or some other kind of 3D acceleration. For instance Blender or OpenSCAD will do the trick, and even SheepShaver because it also relies on OpenGL as far as I can remember from when I was remotely involved in its development. Now I can only hope someone at Apple reads this and it gives them a clue about how to fix it…

Update 2024/05/15: it's the Intel Graphics.

With the help of the above, I figured out that the problem only occurs when the Intel Graphics GPU is being used while the Music app is playing music. Yes, it makes no sense from any rational point-of-view that playing music will slow down the GPU, but I have the experimental evidence to prove it. This means there is a simpler workaround than to keep some app running that causes the graphics to switch to the discrete Radeon or NVidia GPU. Go to System Settings and in the Battery section, click the Options button and disable “Automatic graphics switching.” This will cause the discrete GPU to be always used, and the sluggishness will be gone. This will of course affect battery life, so you may want to re-enable that option when battery life matters.

Update 2024/05/23: it's finally fixed… NOT!

After upgrading Audio Hijack to the newest version, it behaved really poorly, with audio regularly cutting out while coreaudiod crash reports appeared. After contacting Rogue Amoeba, they told me that the freshly released Sonoma 14.5 should contain improvements to audio handling. Needless to say, I upgraded right away—things could hardly get any worse. And everything seemed fine at first: not only is Audio Hijack now running smoothly, the main problem explained in this blog post also seemed to be gone! No more hiccups when playing music without doing all kinds of weird workaround dances. Sonoma finally feels usable again.
However, after a few days the problem has returned. This bug will never get fixed, because it's one of those semi-random bugs from hell that only manifest themselves after a certain time in very specific environments. I guess MacOS has become such a massive piece of bloat that it starts producing this type of bugs which are a total ordeal to reliably reproduce, let alone fix. I suspect the actual problem may be some kind of memory leak that eventually causes data to be constantly hauled between the main system and GPU. Luckily the workarounds described above remain effective.

The State of Thingiverse, End of 2019

In June 2016, I bought a 3D printer on a whim, I only had one real concrete idea for something useful to print. But no worries, because there proved to be a website containing a few millions of free 3D models. Granted, the vast majority of models posted on it proved to be useless junk, but some were either very cool or truly useful. That site was Thingiverse. It was, and still is, the de facto standard for 3D printable model sharing. At that time, the site worked pretty well and had a very active and mostly friendly community. Questions would most often be replied to with useful advice, and if there was a problem with the website, there would at least be an acknowledgement even if the problem was not soon fixed.

The Good

Thingiverse used to be one of the main things that kept feeding my interest in 3D printing. Not just because of the new models coming in every few minutes, but also because of the community, and because it was pretty easy to share my own models, many of which started out as improvements upon someone else's. I am now the co-author of the “Flexi Rex with stronger links,” one of the models a present-day buyer of a new 3D printer seems likely to print as one of their very first attempts. I never anticipated this, I only improved upon an existing model because it broke way too soon when my grandson was playing with it. This is what I like about this community, one can easily take an existing model and improve it, and share this improvement for everyone to enjoy.

The Bad

Today however, things have changed for the worse. The turning point was somewhere in 2017, when one of the main moderators of the website, called ‘glitchpudding’, suddenly left. After this, it became much harder to get any response from whomever was responsible for maintaining the site. At the increasingly rare times that there was some kind of announcement, each time it was from a different person I had never heard of before, as if the previous one had been fired. This would not have been that bad if the website would have maintained its same quality level, but it did not. All kinds of annoying issues started popping up, like the website becoming very slow at times or throwing 500, 501, 502, … HTTP errors at random moments.

Complaining about this seemed to be of no use, because only rarely would there be a response from what might either be a Thingiverse employee or maybe just some random joker — there was no way to verify that whoever was replying on the discussion forums, was an actual Thingiverse / Makerbot employee, it was often a different username, more often without than with the “Thingiverse” badge.

Then it got worse: apparently the nearly invisible Oompa-loompas now running the site, were trying to make certain changes for… reasons. One can only guess when something has changed, because there is barely any communication when this happens. The most obvious sign of a change is an increase in the number of issues. Suddenly all photo previews were broken. Then suddenly they worked again, but any photo that was not in a 4:3 aspect ratio, would be shown distorted. This was not the case before: photos used to be letterboxed and/or cropped in reasonable ways. What was the point of this change? It only made the user experience worse.

Now at the end of 2019, there are finally some advance warnings or notifications that some issue is being worked on. For instance in December there was a site-wide banner telling that there would be “maintenance”. One would expect that this maintenance was aimed at improving the state of the website, but instead when it had ended, we had an extra HTTP error in the 500 range and random 404 errors as well, even on the main page. A website gives a very bad impression if its main page throws a 404 error.

Overall the website in its current state gives a strong impression of lack of professionalism, sometimes downright amateurism. It seems that whoever is maintaining it, does no more effort in testing their changes than trying something once and then assuming it will always work. I wonder if they have a testing environment at all. Often it feels as if they make changes to the production servers directly. The changes give an impression of lack of skill in developing a modern cloud-based website, rather it looks like trendy hipster frameworks are just being thrown on top of a rickety organically grown base without much vision. I am not saying the (obviously few) developers working on the site are amateurs, but the end result does give that kind of impression. This is likely to be merely because management does not allow the developers to spend enough time to implement things properly, so they are forced to only quickly hack things together.

These are all ‘feelings’ and ‘impressions’ due to the total lack of communication. Only from the recent 504 error pages I could see for instance that they had either thrown ‘openresty’ into the mix, or had already been using it but had now broken something about it. There has been no announcement for this or an explanation why.

I have created my own issue tracker on GitHub just to make all the most obvious problems with the website more visible, in the hopes that this would help the maintainers to decide what to fix next, but it seems to be completely ignored.

The Ugly: my guess at what is going on here

In case you didn't already know, Thingiverse is owned by Makerbot and since 2013, Makerbot is a subsidiary of Stratasys, a company that already marketed 3D printers way before the big 3D printer boom started around the year 2010. Makerbot has changed from a small company selling affordable open source printers, to a big company selling rather expensive walled-garden machines aimed at the education market. I guess most of the original enthusiastic team wanting to change the world (like glitchpudding) have either been fired and replaced by people only interested in milking profits from whatever looks vaguely promising without actually caring about it, or they have transformed into such people themselves.

Thingiverse was part of the original vision of making 3D printing affordable for the home user, a vision that does not really fit with Stratasys, the company selling industrial machines at industrial prices. I guess that at every moment since 2013 when a decision about Thingiverse had to be made, the decision has been biased towards gradually sunsetting the website. Nobody at those companies seems to understand the value of this huge playground that encourages anyone to buy, experiment with, and get familiar with 3D printers. It doesn't matter that no beginner will immediately buy a horribly expensive Makerbot or Stratasys printer: the mere fact that there is a low threshold to gain experience with 3D printers, will increase the chance that these same tinkerers will later on generate profits for those companies. That however is probably way too much thinking-ahead for the average marketeer who has been brainwashed to always take greedy short-term decisions and lodge themselves into a cozy local optimum.

What Really Is Going On

Shortly after writing this article, someone notified me about this blog post: https://xyzdims.com/2019/11/21/misc-formnext-2019-aka-just-too-much-for-one-day/

It contains a part about Makerbot's presence on the Formnext 2019 exhibition. The author had the chance to talk to Jason Chan, who is responsible for Thingiverse. Many of my suspicions are confirmed: only two developers are assigned to the site (and I guess only part-time), and the company greatly underestimates the importance of Thingiverse. There seems to be some commitment to improve it, but again it looks as if the ones holding the bag of money do not share this commitment… Still no concrete indication of what will actually happen to the site.

“But it's free!”

Every time someone posts a complaint about the broken state of the website on the Thingiverse Group forums, there will be replies in the vein of: “but it is free, you have no right to complain.” I disagree. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everyone who uploads content to the website, somehow invests in it. Some more than others, depending on how much effort they put in crafting the presentation and documentation of their Things. I have invested quite a lot, with about 120 published Things, each with pictures and an extended description. What I am now getting in return, is a pile of issues that make it harder to upload and edit Things, and I have no idea where the site is heading because of the lack of communication from the part of the maintainers. This lack of communication and lack of care to properly test each change, feels very disrespectful, even though only in an indirect manner. It almost makes me feel like an idiot for having put all this effort in my uploads during the years I have been on the site.

There are a few particular users on the Thingiverse groups who will react religiously against any complaint, one of whom has a pretty apt username given his writing style, which makes it seem as if he is drunk (he probably just is). Ignore them, because they are either trolls feeding on the anger, Makerbot employees paid to hold a denial campaign, idiots, or all of the above. None of them upload much of anything, therefore they don't even have any ground to stand on with their claims that the site works perfectly fine.

The content creators are the only reason of existence for Thingiverse. These creators deserve a little more respect than being ignored and being handed increasingly cumbersome tools to upload their content, without any explanation of what is being changed about the website, when, and why. There is no excuse for such poor communication in this era with so many different digital communication methods (and no, Twitter is not really a good communication method). I know it can be done better, because I was pretty content with how the site was maintained and how changes were communicated when I joined it in 2016. I have the feeling that the main breaking point for the website, was when the aforementioned glitchpudding left somewhere in 2017. It seems to have gone downhill ever since. I am not the one who demands infinite progress in everything, but I do expect that when something is good, people do the effort to keep it good.

Solutions, alternatives?

Obviously any sane person witnessing such evolutions on a certain website, would start looking for an alternative. That however proves to be a big problem with Thingiverse: there is no real alternative. I have looked at some other sites, but Thingiverse's biggest trump card is its sheer library of things. No other site comes close to it, therefore it doesn't matter if Makerbot only keeps Thingiverse at a level where it is just usable enough, people will keep coming for the content.

YouMagine looks decent at a first glance: its interface is the most similar to Thingiverse's I have found so far. It is owned by Ultimaker, alhough this is not explicitly mentioned on the site's main page. After trying it out however, it is obvious that YouMagine suffers from the same lack of maintenance, or worse. The ‘blog’ part has not been updated in ages, the featured things remain the same for a very long time, and reporting spam is impossible because the ‘report’ link only points to a dead support e-mail address. The 3D model previews and the ‘assembled view’ feature are mostly broken. Links and bold text do not work in the description text, which is incredibly annoying (I can imagine that they disabled links due to the spam, but bold text: why?!)
The site still runs, but it looks like a ghost ship. Maybe the only good thing about this is that if nobody changes anything about it, they also cannot break anything about it…

There are other sites like MyMiniFactory, against which I have grown an aversion due to the apparent shills promoting it on Thingiverse groups as the best thing since sliced bread. There is also Cults3D but just as with MMF, I find that there is too much emphasis on hiding content behind a paywall.

I have no concrete ideas for a solution. The best thing would be if a new website would be constructed by a community that does care about it, not tied to one particular manufacturer, and with a strategy to keep the community and website alive in the long term. Ideally, somehow the Thingiverse library would then be migrated to this site, but that is optional. I have made backups of all my uploaded models and their descriptions and photos, and I will happily re-upload them to a new website that is worth it. Maybe it would be better this way because to be honest, I estimate 80% of all Thingiverse models to be junk that would better be garbage collected. Starting from a clean slate might be better…