Motion Artwork Maker
Convert a video clip into a silent, square, looping clip matching Apple Music's Animated Artwork spec — center-cropped to 1:1, audio stripped, trimmed to a loop. Submission still goes through your distributor; this prepares the file to their spec.
Codec
HEVC encoding needs Safari or a hardware-accelerated encoder — this browser can only export H.264. H.264-in-MP4 is accepted by most distributor pipelines as a re-encodable intermediate, but check with your distributor if HEVC is a hard requirement.
Animated Artwork plays silently and on a loop wherever Apple Music shows it, so the audio track gets stripped entirely regardless of what the source clip contains — there's no reason to keep it, and removing it here avoids submitting a file with leftover audio a distributor would just reject anyway.
Common questions
Why does Apple prefer HEVC over the more common H.264?
HEVC compresses video more efficiently at the same visual quality, which matters for a format that autoplays and loops constantly across millions of devices — smaller files mean less bandwidth and storage spent on something that's purely decorative. H.264 still works as a fallback since most distributor pipelines can re-encode it.
Does the loop length actually need to be short?
Apple recommends keeping it tight — around 8 seconds or under — specifically because a longer loop makes any seam between the end and the restart more noticeable to someone staring at it during playback, rather than because of a hard technical limit below the 30-second ceiling.