Apple Music What is the deal with Apple Music's refusal to buffer?

[ric22]

Even on blazing fast connections, across every device, whether connected via Ethernet or wifi, Apple Music will at times stutter and momentarily pause, seemingly because it has failed to bother to buffer even 2 seconds worth of data beforehand.

Why why why? Spotify doesn't do this! Why not download the entirety of a song as it is beginning to play (or pre fetch the next song in advance when playing an album), in the same way Netflix et al can buffer 4K video on the fly so that doesn't stutter or pause or drop frame rate, when it's given a great connection to play with? An audio track should be incredibly low bit rate compared to 4K footage.

Note: At first I fought this was a HomePod issue, so I did some testing across multiple locations with multiple devices (iPhone, MacBook Air, iMac, HomePod OG), and two different accounts.

 

[Crunchynut]

I don’t have this problem (20mb/s internet) so it would appear it might be regional.

The only effect I witness is, if playing a track not previously played, there is often a 2s pause before it starts playing which I presume is time to fetch and buffer.

 

[solq]

Strange, I never had any playback issue when I had an Apple Music subscription.

 

[ric22]

For the record, I had the problem for months in England, and this week I'm on holiday in Thailand, and the problem persists.

 

[ric22]

This problem is in addition to the skip/stutter evident in every song, regardless of being lossless or not, at approximately the 12 second mark. There's multiple threads about that particular Apple screw up. Telephone support passed me on to a senior technician and he suspected the only fix would be to delete all my music their end, and my account, and start again from scratch on that one.

 

[Crunchynut]

What is your equipment chain?

I ask because I used to have a Zen Stream in my chain which would often result in the first half a second of a new song being skipped. I got rid of that and these days I either Airplay from iPhone to gen 2 Apple TV then to DAC, or stay USB wired from iPad to DAC.

 

[ric22]

There's no chain while I'm in Thailand. I can either play from the one HomePod I brought with me, or from my iPhone or from my M1 MacAir.