After upgrading to macOS Tahoe, Music.app consistently cuts off the beginning of every track on playback. Reinstalling macOS did not resolve the issue. Apple support could not help. Songs play back normally on other apps.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.2
It turns out I can eliminate this on my machine by turning off the equalizer. With equalizer on, roughly the first half-second of audio is cut off; with the equalizer off, it’s back to normal (not cutting off the beginning of the track).
It turns out I can eliminate this on my machine by turning off the equalizer. With equalizer on, roughly the first half-second of audio is cut off; with the equalizer off, it’s back to normal (not cutting off the beginning of the track).
It sounds like one of the new playback features in Music is getting in the way rather than a system‑wide audio problem, especially since other apps are fine.
1. Turn off AutoMix and Crossfade
2. Turn off the Equalizer
3. Check custom start times (for local files)
If songs play normally after disabling AutoMix, Crossfade, and EQ, you’ve run into a current Music.app bug in Tahoe rather than something wrong with your Mac, and you can leave those features off until Apple fixes it in a future update.
Ashley_Rin wrote:
• It sounds like one of the new playback features in Music is getting in the way rather than a system‑wide audio problem, especially since other apps are fine.
1. Turn off AutoMix and Crossfade
In Music, go to Music > Settings (or Preferences) > Playback.
• Turn off AutoMix and Crossfade Songs completely, then quit and reopen Music and test again.
• 2. Turn off the Equalizer
In the same Music > Settings window, go to the Playback/Audio tab and turn the Equalizer (EQ) off.
• Several macOS Tahoe users reported the first 0.5–1 second of every track being clipped only when EQ was enabled.
• 3. Check custom start times (for local files)
Select a song, press Command + I > Options.
• Make sure “Start” is either unchecked or set to 0:00 so Music isn’t skipping the first second on every track.
If songs play normally after disabling AutoMix, Crossfade, and EQ, you’ve run into a current Music.app bug in Tahoe rather than something wrong with your Mac, and you can leave those features off until Apple fixes it in a future update.
All of those features are off and the songs are still cut off. It's not any of those things. Every single song in the Tahoe version of Music has its beginning cut off, but some songs start very low or have a tiny bit of silence at the head, and you don't notice it on those. But you can prove this by using Miniplayer to pause, drag the slider back to the beginning and hit Play. Then you see that the song itself is fine, it's the main player which is clipping the beginnings of songs.
This is happening to me as well and it's definitely part of the Tahoe upgraded which changed many things about the Music app. I don't stream, all my music is local (downloaded or imported, and so far it's been most noticeable at the start of playlists I've built. One discovery I made is that if you start a playlist where the first song clips, if you immediately pause it and then use the Miniplayer window to manually drag the slider back to the beginning, it will play the whole clip from the beginning. It's extremely annoying and I suspect it's something in the OS that's trying to predict what you will do next or whatever
I'm not sure what is causing this. However, in another thread, Korolija observed that there is no "introductory silence." This may be a bandaid on the actual problem but I added a bit of silence to the beginning of the music (I added 0.5 seconds of silence) and the music sounded fine again!!
This should be a hint to Apple as to the fix. I don't want to go find and then adjust the waveform of every piece of music exhibiting this problem. All of my music worked just fine in previous versions. This is a new problem.
Apple PLEASE fix this problem.
Does the song start to fade at the end and then it cuts off the beginning? If it does then most likely you have Automix enabled which causes the song to fade at the end and plays the next song at least a couple seconds in. I hope this helps!
It's happening on every single track, but some tracks were encoded with a tiny bit of silence at the head and so it doesn't show up on those. You can start playing a clip anywhere, and then immediately hit Pause in the Miniplayer window, then drag the slider back to the zero point and hit Play. When you do that, it starts the clip from the correct point at the beginning. This shows it's something in the main player's code that has been rendered poorly functioning.
Some songs are already encoded with about a second of silence at the head, and they are not getting cut off. In the Miniplayer you can see when you press "Play" the song starts at the 1 second mark and not at the zero mark. You can stop a song and manually drag the slider back to get it to start at the right point, but who wants to do that for every song on a playlist. Almost certainly this bug is part of the merge between the MacOS and iOS versions of the Music app, and as you state it is 100% correctable by Apple and needs to be.
Same here. Songs added to my library on Mac. Streaming, not downloaded. The very first part of the song does not play. For example, if the song starts with a drum beat, the very first drum is not played. I've researched this and tried everything. Cross fade and auto mix are off. I've toggled every setting I can think of and it makes no difference. I did some testing and it's even happening with downloaded tracks that have been in my library for years. So it seems to be a problem with the latest version of Apple Music on the new Mac OS. I hope someone can figure out a fix.
I'm experiencing this issue as well as several others. Cutting off the beginning of the songs occurs with streaming and audio files for me. This has been really difficult as a music instructor.
I've also noticed that it doesn't allow scrolling within the track. You can only click where you want it to go on the track timeline.
The issue with having to click somewhere outside of the search box a dozen times to get it to not be highlighted is still not fixed.
Every time I update, there are several original audio tracks, made by either me or students, that get deleted. Or with this new update the track still exists in the library but it is 0 seconds long and trying to play it sends itunes to some type of "autoplay" limbo of silence. Typically forcing me to restart music and sometimes my computer.
A huge one that just started occurring this last week is my mouse cursor dragging songs around, as if I'm holding the left click down. This makes it impossible to do anything else in the music app, and sometimes other apps and functions of the computer. Most of the time this turns into me having to restart my computer.
The combinations of these issues have been a huge impediment in my job. A couple of these issues have been around for multiple OS versions, and at this point I'm really reconsidering continuing to use apple products along with my work.
You don't need to reorganize where the buttons are and rearrange the functions of programs with relatively simple purposes, like playing audio files, every time you release a new version of the OS. Come on apple, this is embarassing, do better.
Don Eccles wrote:
Upgraded to Tahoe 26.3 and problem still exists. Apple needs to look at this, it's annoying to lose the first 2 seconds of every song.
Have you let them know what you're seeing?
Yes, I have notified them about this and about the several other issues with the Music app that came along with Tahoe, e.g. inability to scroll in long playlists, playlists no longer responding to changes made while the playlist is active, failure to update metadata for music videos that are the last item in a playlist, etc. I filed four different product feedback reports, but I suspect they will not act on them until a lot of people also do so.
Armando Stettner wrote:
For what it is worth, I did make a submission via Feedback Assistant. I suspect the more submissions the more squeaky the wheel will be!
That is also my assumption. It's why I always encourage people to report things.
I’m experiencing this as well — and in my case it’s even worse. It seems to affect music I’ve purchased from Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc., along with tracks I ripped from CDs. I used to subscribe to iTunes Match, but I never saw it actually do what it claimed (“replace or upload songs as 256 Kbps AAC DRM-free files”), since my library continued playing the original ripped versions, so I eventually canceled.
Right now I can only play one track at a time, and like others here, the issue started sometime after upgrading to Tahoe. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t happening immediately after the initial upgrade, but appeared later — possibly after subsequent updates. I’ve tried several of the fixes mentioned in this thread, but none have resolved it.
For what it is worth, I did make a submission via Feedback Assistant. I suspect the more submissions the more squeaky the wheel will be!
Music.app consistently cuts off the beginning of every track on playback.
