my music app (ver. 1.2.5.7 running in OS monterey 12.5.1) does not reliably suffle by album. it sometimes jumps out of an incompleted album and into the middle of another album. it currently manages ~600GB of data as ~ 30K tracks.

i believe i have partly resolved this issue after further investigation.

the problem has to do with "songs" within albums that do not have the same "date modified" (or possibly the same "date added"). this would occur, for example, to edit labels already entered.

if the shuffle album queue reaches a track (not "song") with a different date, then it may either (1) skip this track and continue with the next in sequence track with the expected date, or (2) skip out of the album entirely to a new album.

if (2) happens, then the queue may skip to the start of the new album or land on the second or later track within the album.

i isolated this issue by identifying one or more albums with the skip bug, examining all viewable data fields, and locating "date modified" as the only differentiating value. i then selected the entire album, opened the "info" pane and changed some global value such as album title, performer or composer, saved the change, quit music, and opened music. the bug was eliminated.

a possible confounding issue is when the label edit to a single track is edited "in database" by displaying music as "songs" in list format, double clicking on a single field to activate it, making the text change, and pressing return (or clicking on another field). i don't know if this exclusively causes the problem or is just one of two ways for it to occur.

this is a bug.

the bug demonstrates that "album" is not a superordinate attribute in the database or in the shuffle algorithm. "date modified" can in some instances override or conflict with it.

i don't know how apple support community works, but this bug was highly annoying to me and i spent considerable time figuring it out. there is no longer a "bug report" feature within music and i know of no bug report channel to apple directly. if you know of such a channel, let me know. if not, anyone with that connection available should pass it up the chain.

it's a bug.

no, i don't (don't know how) to mark tracks as "skip when shuffling". the only time tracks appear as "checked" or unchecked is when disks are displayed in music from my CD player when i rip them. at that point i don't "check/uncheck" tracks i do/don't want to rip, i either "import disk" or highlight tracks manually with the mouse and then use the "convert" command in the pulldown "file" menu. sometimes i edit track/disk info here before the disk is ripped, but usually only after it is ripped.

yes, i visually displayed all the fields available in the "show view options" then sorted each field to check that the content of that field, other than those listed above, was empty across all files. i have visually (!) inspected every track (!) in the entire database to ensure all "track number" values are consecutive within an album and that the "total tracks" number equals the track number of the last track.

yes, once i notice that a bad skip has occurred (e.g., instead of the third movement of a beethoven symphony it skips to the fifth track in a cab calloway collection), if i use the player "back" arrow the player will skip back to the previous track and will repeat the bad jump. i have tried manually double clicking on the previous track; or closing music, launching it again and clicking on the previous track, to see if it is some artifact of the player sequence, and it will still produce the bad jump. (i do not use playlists.)

i do suspect that there is some persistent database value attached to tracks that is not displayed in the "show view options" that is affecting the player behavior, but i can't find what that value is; it is not displayed if i display all checkable fields.

*none* of the tracks have been downloaded from apple music, and the anomaly occurs both in ripped disks and in mp3 files downloaded from music vendors (i.e., amazon.com).

my other suspicion is that at 30,497 tracks i have exceeded some software performance limit in music and this is causing the odd play sequence/shuffle behavior. but this does not feel like a software bug because it only happens with some, not all, tracks/albums. however, as i said, i can't find anything in the viewable data of tracks that allows me to target any specific exceptional value or lack of value that will account for it.

1. thanks tt2 for the explanation for showing checkboxes. i find that all 30,497 tracks are (have been) checked.
2. i understand the issue with duplicate album/composer entries. my procedure is to number duplicate album titles in brackets at the end of the title, for example "tango project [1]", "tango project [2]", etc. this seems to be completely effective.

i indicated with my example, a leap from the middle of a beethoven symphony to the middle of a cab calloway compilation, that duplicate album names, duplicate artists or duplicate composers does not seem to be causing the issue.

i don't find in your comments the suggestion to rename, save, revert name, save, quit and open music as a remedy for the "skip bug". although by your account (if i understand your comment) it works. also, i don't use album cover art and would delete album covers entirely from my music database if i could (to minimize filesize).

but the bug you describe sounds like a related problem in the algorithm.

either way, i ask you to file your own bug report on the issue, as multiple reports are more likely to get the attention of the typical software engineering team. i find this bug very annoying.

thanks for all your time and help.