Catalina Music app crashes on launch

catalinacrashmusic.app

I seem to be encountering a rare issue. Every time I launch the Music app, it crashes immediately. I found one post (with no replies) in the Apple Developer Forums that describes the same behavior. Other than that, there seems to be no documented troubleshooting attempts for this problem.

Here's the header data of the crash report in case that helps.

Process:               Music [13614]
Path:                  /System/Applications/Music.app/Contents/MacOS/Music
Identifier:            com.apple.Music
Version:               1.0.4 (1.0.4)
Build Info:            MusicDesktop-1000004104000~12
Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        ??? [1]
Responsible:           Music [13614]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2020-03-26 11:59:11.132 +0100
OS Version:            Mac OS X 10.15.4 (19E266)
Report Version:        12
Bridge OS Version:     4.4 (17P4263)
Anonymous UUID:        FF0B6266-D3B2-D56E-EFD1-847258F220E2

Sleep/Wake UUID:       DD4C4B22-0AAD-4D6C-9137-61717713A2A4

Time Awake Since Boot: 8700 seconds
Time Since Wake:       1800 seconds

System Integrity Protection: disabled

Crashed Thread:        0  Music main  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000020
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal:    Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process:   exc handler [13614]

Best Answer

After some annoying trial and error which convinced me that the new Music app - at least in its current state - is even worse than iTunes, I was able to resolve this issue by

  1. Completely removing all files related to the Music app that App Cleaner was able to find, in particular including preference files and (maybe, see step 3) Music.app itself. Deleting the latter requires making the root volume writable via sudo mount -uw / and possibly disabling System Integrity Protection. I have that off always. Not sure if it's required.
  2. Move the library folder and the library file Music Library.musiclibrary to a new location, e.g. ~/Desktop.

  3. Delete the old Music.app and transfer a new copy from an unaffected Mac also running Catalina.

    Note: I think this step might be unnecessary. Just listing it here for completeness since that was one of the steps I took but don't care to repeat the process without it to see if it still works.

  4. Launch the new Music.app to confirm that it runs without crashing immediately, then close it again.
  5. Move the library folder and file Music Library.musiclibrary to its original location, usually ~/Music.
  6. Launch Music.app while holding alt to change libraries. Choose the original library location (not the library folder itself, i.e. in my case ~/Music).
  7. Done. I was now able to launch Music.app again with all my songs in it.
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