First song will not play after opening Music

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First song will not play after opening Music

I just upgraded to macOS 11 Big Sur and have several issues with Music.

The biggest problem at the moment is that when I open Music and click on Shuffle Play or try to start playing any song manually, it appears in the top 'playback bar' and there is a splashy progress bar that goes back and forth, but the song will not play. I have tried:

Pausing and playing - no good
Pausing and moving the playback start point then playing - no good
Changing music output (built-in, external) - no good

The only thing that seems to get music playing is to select a different song, either with FF/RW or double-clicking a different song. If I search for the 'hung up' song after this it will play normally, so there is nothing wrong with the music file itself.

All of my music is stored on my local startup volume and is primarily Apple Lossless format.

Is anyone else seeing this? It seems like the current Music app is a mess.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 10, 2021 2:43 PM

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Answer 1

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TammyW_03

Community Specialist

Mar 11, 2021 7:30 PM in response to Tom Cassel

Hello Tom Cassel,

Thanks for visiting Apple Support Communities. We understand that you're having an issue with the Music app not playing your first song. It does seem like it isn't related to your music, but likely the app. If you haven't already, quit the Music app and restart your Mac to see if that helps. Restarting can resolve many odd issues: Log out, sleep, wake, restart or shut down your Mac

If that doesn't help, since you just upgraded, start your Mac to safe mode, sign in to your user account, then restart normally to exit safe mode. During start up to safe mode several things happen, such as a basic check of your startup disk, clearing some cache files, and more. After restarting from safe mode, test the issue with Music once more. If you do happen to try to listen to music while started to safe mode, please note the sound is disabled. Here's more information on safe mode, and how to start there: How to use safe mode on your Mac

If you still notice the same behavior, we'll narrow this down further by seeing if this happens in another user account. This will tell us if the issue is system-wide, or only happening in your user account: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Keep us posted on the results.

Take care.

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First song will not play after opening Music

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