Does Apple Music cuts off the beginning of songs on your Macs?

A few days ago I replaced my old Mac mini 2014 (macOS 10.14) with a new Mac mini M4 (macOS 26.1). I have a huge collection of music in my Library and I used iTunes on an old Mac mini without any problem. On the new one, of course I use the Apple Music application.

What I immediately noticed is that there is an annoying bug when playing songs from the new Apple Music application. The bug occurs when a song is clicked to play and any of the sound processing options in this application (Sound Enhancer or Equilazer) are turned on. In this case, the beginning of the song is cut off and not heard. According to my tests, the initial part of the song that is cut off is always the same and lasts about 0.3 seconds.

What can make it difficult to notice this bug is the fact that many song files contain an introductory silence that is longer than 0.3 seconds, so this irritating defect is not heard on all songs, but only on those with this introductory silence of less than 0.3 seconds.

This bug only occurs when the user clicks on the song they want to play. When the user plays songs (playlist) and the application continues to play the next songs after the first one we clicked on, this bug is no longer heard on those next songs. So once again, the bug only applies to the song that the user clicks on and chooses to play it. If we click ten times on a song, we will hear ten times that the beginning of the song has been cut off.

The way audio is processed in Apple Music has definitely changed compared to iTunes. In iTunes, after turning on Equilazer, it takes about 3-4 seconds to hear that Equilazer has started working, while in Apple Music, Equilazer works much faster after turning on (eg after 0.3 seconds - maybe this change is where this bug originated).

Also, it seems to me (subjectively) that the Equilazer is much stronger in Apple Music than in iTunes (although the Equilazer itself looks identical in both applications).

Since this is very annoying, and I like to have the Equilazer on while listening to music, the workaround for me is to use the Audio Hijack application and adjust the Equilazer for Apple Music in it.

I hope Apple will fix this as soon as possible.