Music App – Shuffle by Groupings Broken?

[mcaswell]

I'm trying to set up my classical music collection to utilize the "Groupings" feature. In particular, I want to be able to shuffle between works as a whole, so it starts on the first movement of a piece and plays all the movements before randomly picking another entire piece to play, rather than skipping around from movement to movement of various pieces.

I started to set up my groupings to do this, did a test consisting of a dozen or so pieces, and found it was working as expected, so I did the entire library. Problem is, it's not working anymore, as it behaves as though the shuffle mode is set to "Songs" and skips around. Through much trial and error, I did determine that if I drastically cut down the number of pieces in the playlist, it would work as expected (which I guess is why it worked fine when I initially tested with a small number of pieces).

I'm not sure of the precise number that tips it into not working, but if I have 16 symphonies (IOW, 16 groupings) of 66 movements total in the playlist, shuffle by groupings does not work, and if I delete one of those symphonies (leaving 15 groupings, or 62 movements) it starts to work fine. It does not appear to be related to any particular piece (like some kind of corruption in that particular file), as I can add a piece that breaks the functionality, then remove a different piece and it works again.

Is anyone successfully using this feature?

 

[mcaswell]

Update... I was able to get it working. I found a few older posts elsewhere complaining about the interaction between the new "work and movement" fields and "grouping". These seemed to mainly complain that the trouble was with iTunes moving the contents of these tags around, but there were also general indications of problems (my files have been tagged with both grouping as well as work/movements). So, I cleared the grouping tag from my files, leaving them organized with the work/movements tags, and now shuffle by groups (which apparently also applies to pieces tagged by work and movement), and it's functioning fine now.

So, it appears that having both grouping and work/movement populated causes the Music app to get confused, but only when a certain number of files are present? I can't say with absolute certainty that this was the issue, because I also did a few other things with the tagging of my files, but removing the grouping tag was the main thing and the only one seemingly directly related to the problem, so I'm assuming that was it.

 

[satcomer]

Send Apple some Apple Music FeedBack and get others to similar complaints and maybe it will get to developers of the program!