Apple Music on iMac Does Not Shuffle At All Any Longer

I have over 40,000 tracks. Most of them are sound fonts, personal productions, audiobooks, and public domain audiobooks from Librovox. I don't use Apple Books because it is far to basic and doesn't allow for much in the way of user control of one's library... let alone you can't keep Apple's Books library on an external drive. It's intended to fill the measly little tiny drive Apple overcharges for in its machines. So, now I use Calibre for my epubs, and maintain my audiobooks in Music as was normal in iTunes before the great big deal that became a front door to Apples streaming nonsense.

However, today I notices that Apple's shuffle system wasn't functioning at all. It has never been satisfactory a mechanism as far back as I can remember, but I noticed today that even with a playlist of only 3300 tracks, shuffle had been playing the same five tracks repeatedly. In fact, one track had it's play count at over 2600 times! While many of the rest of the tracks played between 2 or 4 times, with many never having been played EVER!

In fact every time I hit the shuffle button it would only play those same five tracks in various order never changing to any other track. Also, when I left the play list and went into the main library, it still remained doing this. It would not play any other tracks but those five tracks.

I tried every suggestion possible, disk utility, restarting, even resetting play counts, to no avail.

A few months ago, I tried Swinsian player which blows away Apple Music player and couldn't believe how random the shuffle feature was on that. I heard songs in my play lists that I had forgotten I even had. It was like a fresh experience listening to music unlike I've ever had using Apple's moribund music player.

So what's the deal?

Apple's music player has been complained about since long before it made the change from iTunes years ago, and yet it seems Apple ignores these complaints. The complaints all over the internet in other mac oriented forums that Apple cannot censor. But really? Do I have to give up Apple Music altogether and buy Swinsian to have a real, full bodied, true music player that allows me to do with my library what I see fit, rather than what Apple will allow? I'm beginning to think it is worth the $25, because I just can't take Apple's native apps any longer. Apple Music being one of it's worst. It's as if the so-called "walled in garden" is turning into a barbed wire fenced in security yard guarded over with automatic rifles in high turrets... I think it's time to move on to Linux.