Music occasionally pauses playback when using airplay.

Music occasionally pauses playing 3-4 seconds before a song ends. The pause occurs randomly. If I immediately replay the song it will play thru to the end without a pause. I estimate that this happens once out of 10-15 songs on average. Here's what I observe:

1) I have an Airport Express (AE) with firmware version 7.8.1. The AE is normally connected over the wireless network but the problem occurs even if the AE is connected using an ethernet cable connection without being connected over the wireless network.

2) If the standard/default sound output of the computer is the headphones and the AE is selected as one of the outputs of Music, and a playlist is playing Music will randomly pause playing 3-4 seconds before the end a song. After a couple seconds it will continue playing, though it skips about 1 second of the song. It will finish the song and start playing the next song in the playlist. This "pause" occurs about 1 out of 10-15 songs.

To see if this was a hardware problem I selected the AE as the computer's default output (Settings->Sound, select the AE as the output device). Then I selected the default output in Music. With these settings the problem does not occur. So to me this does not appear to be a hardware problem.

I apologize if my descriptions of settings are not clear, please see the attached screen shots for clarity on what I mean.

The problem occurs with AIFF, MP3 and M4A files

I am running Ventura 13.2.1 but this problem also occurred on Monterey.

My music library is at ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music

This problem does not occur with my old macbook pro (intel) running Mohave.

Has anyone seen this problem? I haven't found any posts that describe the same problem.

Any ideas?

There are posts with similar problems but they have been closed.

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