Fixing "determining gapless playback information" problem

MacBook Pro 2017 running Music 1.2.2.40 on Monterey 12.2.1.

I had the same problems until just recently.

I have a large music collection of over 120,000 files.  Everything worked fine except for the system “Determining Gapless Playback” on several thousand files every time I started the Music App or added new tracks.  I had to click on the activity on the bottom left to open the activity window and stop the process and then everything worked fine.  I do not use gapless playback and there is no longer an option to disable it. This was annoying but once I stopped the process everything worked until the next time I opened the Music App.

A couple of weeks ago after adding new tracks to my library I noticed right away that this was no longer happening? I closed and opened the music app several times and this problem seemed to have miraculously fixed itself? I can only assume that it was fixed in the last update and since I usually leave the music app open all the time I had not noticed it was fixed. I am not unhappy but wonder if it was actually fixed or if it was something I did not realizing that I fixed the problem. I did submit a couple of Feedbacks about 2 months ago to Apple reference this problem but did not really expect anything to be done about the problem. I searched for information hoping to find out about it being fixed with the last update that was made to music and found nothing.

At any rate I am glad it has stopped happening and hope it stays that way.

Hope all this made sense and you have a similar experience. I would appreciate it if you would let me know how things work out for you.

Forgot to ask how you were able to select "disable gapless playback" in the preferences, I was unable to find that option.

That is the same way I felt and I have my fingers crossed that the fix is permanent but I am afraid that with the next revision that it will return. Right now the only time it It runs "Determining Gapless Playback" is when I add new tracks and then it is only on the new tracks and not the 15,000 it kept repeating. I am assuming that is the correct behavior for this function. As far as I can see we are both running the same versions of MacOS and Music. The only difference I can see is that you have the M1 Chip and mine is the Intel Core i7. I was hoping that one or the Apple programers would read this and give us some information. Seems to me the simple fix would be to restore the option to just turn it off.

I also had some issues with Artwork and it took me about two weeks to check every album and re-embed where needed. My Library is stored on an external 2 TB SSD which I originally formatted as APFS but that introduced another problem I won't get into right now. When I reloaded my library I changed format of the external drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and that took care of the problem.

When I re-imported my library I unsubscribed my Apple Music Account and run Music locally only. It runs a lot better and faster and cleared up some other problems I was having. Most of my library is ripped from my CD's and Vinyl albums. I also found that the Music App is kind of finicky about MP3 files, unfortunately about half of my library is MP3. Anything new I add now is AAC format.

I will let you know if I ever figure out why it it is now working for me. Please stay in touch.

Follow up to previous replies.

All of the tracks that I have have added since the Monterey 12.2.1 Upgrade have been AAC files and I had not had any problems with Determining Gapless Playback. Today I added an Album that I had previously ripped to MP3 files to my library and now every time I opened the Music App it was running Determining Gapless Playback on all of the files in that last album that I imported.   I converted the album tracks to AAC files and and the problem disappeared for that album. 

I still have thousands MP3 files in my library however since the upgrade to 12.2.1 the Music App now ignores them for some reason and I have not had any issues.  If I add any new MP3 Files sometimes the problem returns. So far converting this tracks to AAC has corrected the issues for that album.   So I can only assume that the cause of the problem is with only some MP3 files. I have tried some repair apps for MP3 files without any success. The only solution that seems to work is to convert the MP3 tracks to AAC.  

Today I upgraded to Monterey Version 12.3 which does not seem to be any different than 12.2.1.

I still do not have an explanation why only some of the MP3 imports cause problems or why several  thousand files suddenly stopped causing the “Determining Gapless Playback” procedure to run. I had let the procedure finish several times in the past and that did not work. I still have 80,000 tracks in my library that are for now at least not causing any problems.

Anyone with similar experiences please share your knowledge with us.