When enjoying an evening of good music with friends I like to stop the current track as close as possible to the end to allow for discussion of the track and to lay the groundwork for the next track. I then use "Next" to move to the next track. Sometimes the next track starts immediately and sometimes I need to use "Play" to start it. My problem is that occasionally MC freezes after I hit Play and I get the "Media Center is not responding" message and I have to close and restart. This happens for both playlists and albums, in Standard, Display or Theater view, with all audio file formats. It seems to work fine with just using "Next" without first pausing, but this doesn't work for what I want to do. I disabled both Defender and Real Time AV protection to no avail. I am running MC 29.0.87 (64 bit) on my Win 11 HTPC, fully up to date. MC on this machine is a client of a desktop server. I usually use Gizmo for these evenings but it happens just using the local mouse control of the HTPC as well. It has happened through the last couple of Win 11 updates and MC updates. It does not seem to happen on the Win 10 desktop server running the same MC version. I have tried various Audio/Track Change options, although I realize they should not have any effect.
I doubt that I am the only one who pauses and then moves to the next tune, so I am hoping someone can help me.