One month later and it still glitches.
On iOS 17.4 I find that the Music app always skips a fraction of a second within the first 10 seconds of playback. And it doesn't matter from which source the music is. Digital purchases, matched songs or unmatched songs, even MP3... and it also doesn't matter if it was previously (re)downloaded onto the iOS device.
My HomePod mini's also have this issue, but a little bit less.
This morning I opened the Music app on my Mac (MacOS 14.4 Sonoma) at work. When I pressed play on whatever song, Apple Music or an MP3 of my own, it just stopped within 10 seconds. The play button kept showing the play status, but the speakers were silent. When I press the play button again it showed the pause state, but then the music started playing again for another 5 seconds... weird. Restarted the app a few times, but nothing changed.
But then I noticed something... the app was searching for an one of the HomePod's at home, which I had used yesterday. For some reason it kept looking for that device very long and meanwhile it used the built-in speakers for 5-8 seconds. It took around 2-3 minutes until the Music app finally decided to show a pop-up in which it explained that it was searching for different speakers. After selecting the built-in output, the music started to play normally.
But after a while the issue came back... playing a newly searched song for 5-7 seconds... then it stops again, still searching for the AirPlay device that isn't on the connected network.
This macOS version is the worst I ever experienced... did Apple hire former Microsoft programmers or something?