As I was reading your post, the first thing I was gonna suggest was reformatting the drive and reloading the music, and not the quick format but FULL. In Windows File Explorer you can also right click, selected Properties, then Tools, and then "Error Checking" before the FULL format.

Last paragraph say that's what you did that and "changed" to FAT32. For Windows, the newer exFAT is becoming default on newer larger USB drives. I'd expect the older FAT32 should be the best for a 2013 to 2017 system.