Desktop Music App does not retain new files, play counts, last played info, smart playlist changes, etc.

We are running MAC OS 15.0 Seqouia with an M3 Chipset

on a pretty new 2023 iMac 8GB

Our music files and .musiclibrary file are stored on an external hard drive connected with a USB-C/lightning cable.

An upgrade from OS Sonoma to OS sequoia did not help the following issue. 

After an upgrade to OS Sequoia the Music app seems to crash more often, making updated files even harder to retain.

The music library file (formerly .itl) apparently does continue to update often, though this is not evidenced whenever the Music app reboots. It seems to suffer from a digital form of short term memory loss.

While attempting to use the Music app in any way,  whether altering file Metadata, adding/removing files, smart playlist parameters, or if a different media player program is drawing files from it, the CPU on the computer is topped out at over 100%. The cursor pinwheels and goes the activity monitor goes into "kernel task".

In this case the media playout software is Radiologik DJ and Radiologik Scheduler

Furthermore, the Music App does not retain new files, play counts, last played info, smart playlist changes, etc.

Whenever the computer or app is restarted, all the altered info or added files are lost.

It's pretty tedious to deal with. One of the things I really don't understand, is how the Music app retains any of our old smart playlists.

If it's able to account for, and play successfully from previously existing playlists, then I don't see why it can't create new ones.

Very odd.

I would think that a problem like this would disable all of our playlists, not just the ones we are trying to create.

Also, it does not make sense that the stock music managing app and a media player would top out the CPU, in nearly any situation.

I admit though that we have over 100 smart playlists all with live updating. We've tried to shat the live-updating feature off on a number of them, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Also those settings are then lost again after the app crashes or the computer is rebooted.

Any thoughts, solutions, anyone experience a similar issue?