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Apple music occasionally pauses playback for about 1/2 second

Mac Mini M1 os 11.6.4 Big Sur Library is on an external WD My Passport 4 tb (not ssd) USB A to USB C

The drive has a partition. 1 TB is for the music and the rest is for Time Machine back up.

Every so often the sound will cut out for about 1/2 second and come right back.

Time Machine isn't doing anything when this happens. I know using an SSD would be better, but could that really what's causing this? I've used an external for storing the music library before on a Macbook Pro probably 12 years ago and don't recall having any problem. I can't really tell if this is pausing or muting the audio because it happens and its over so quickly. There isn't any spinning beachball or anything else.


Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Apr 10, 2022 3:04 PM

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Apr 11, 2022 11:17 AM in response to Pyrosonic

Hi, Pyrosonic.

To start, we'd recommend trying to play music from your internal drive to see if the issue persists there. If it's a bandwidth issue from your external storage to your Mac, this would clarify that.

There are a myriad of possibilities, but that would be the most likely and simplest one to narrow down. It could also be possible that the external drive is beginning to fail, which could be causing this.

For help with changing where music files are stored to test this, you can reference the following article: Change where your music files are stored on Mac

Cheers.

Apple music occasionally pauses playback for about 1/2 second

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