Stop the Apple Music app from launching

by bobbiechen • 1 month ago

669 278 1 month ago

ericskiff• 1 month ago

Thank you, this is a huge pet peeve of mine. I mis-click my airpod and suddenly this app I've never used and don't want launches

ASalazarMX• 1 month ago

this app I've never used and don't want launches

I'm by no way an Apple fan, but why not uninstall the app if you don't need it?

jacobsenscott• 1 month ago

It cannot be uninstalled

wood_spirit• 1 month ago

Same! And there is no obvious close button etc on the overtop blocking modal dialog either. It’s a dark pattern.

verdverm• 1 month ago

I've been using this for a while now: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

Source code for this one: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy

dangerlibrary• 1 month ago

noTunes is one of the first things I install on a new mac.

fartfeatures• 1 month ago

I'm very clumsy and I've never hit the play button by accident. What are you guys doing that makes it so easy to accidentally click the play button? Are you using the mac with the touch bar or something?

echelon_musk• 1 month ago

Same. noTunes works perfectly. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

tomComb2• 1 month ago

It seems I need to leave this running for it to work? So it's not just a configuration changes.

forsalebypwner3• 1 month ago

When you first launch it, you'll notice a pop-up saying that this will automatically run when you login. There's no dock icon or menu bar icon. So no configuration changes needed.

valentiniljaz• 1 month ago

Yes. Yes. Thank you. I wanted something like for years.

bigyabai3• 1 month ago

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this is the default behavior for a supposedly premium operating system.

imglorp2• 1 month ago

It seems the fans are willing to put up with absolutely unlimited grief and inconvenience to drink the koolaid they're given. Some Apple PM made a edict 11 years ago that Music shalt be thine only audio experience on the platform. Lock it down, boys!

The rest of us ask for a customizable experience.

the_gastropod• 1 month ago

This “Apple customers are brainwashed cultists incapable of examining reality” schtick was tired a decade ago. No option’s perfect. But Apple’s current tradeoffs vs other options’ trade offs continue to feel worthwhile to many.

carlosjobim• 1 month ago

1. Pressing play button plays music

"Absolutely unlimited grief and inconvenience!"

autoexec• 1 month ago

If you get a Mac it means you're paying a premium for the carefully curated Apple Experience and if you don't like it you just need to Think Different and do only what Apple allows you to do and only in the way that Apple tells you to do it. Once you surrender to Apple there is no more grief and inconvenience, only joy because then It Just Works.

eviks2• 1 month ago

The OS isn't supposed to be premium since it's free, does that help figure it out?

nkozyra• 1 month ago

You can't buy the OS directly, but it certainly isn't free.

rcxdude• 1 month ago

Because Apple's view seems to be that if you aren't using all of Apple's products, you're not their target audience.

hmokiguess2• 1 month ago

for me it's when I open an audio file and it automatically launches it AND adds it to my music library, the adding to library is what I hate, then I have to delete it and specifically choose "Keep file"

dlev_pika5• 1 month ago

Yeah, this sucks

kccqzy• 1 month ago

Ah a long time ago when the Music app was still called iTunes I have configured all music files to be opened with quicktime player. It’s been so long that I forgot the default was the Music app. To me it’s absolutely clear that playing a file doesn’t mean I want it in my library.

fnordlord• 1 month ago

This was annoying to me too but it is pretty easy to fix. Just right click on the .mp3 or whatever file, Get Info and change the default application to your preferred app and then click on "Change all..."

You have to do it once per file type but it's once and done.

xoa• 1 month ago

Yes, at least in theory changing this is straight forward. Though:

You have to do it once per file type but it's once and done.

I will note I have one Mac with one old user account where it will not remember this anymore across reboots (across macOS 15, plan to skip 26 and hope 27 is acceptable). I haven't had time to try to get into why, but it's occasionally irritating.

hmokiguess2• 1 month ago

Yeah opt-out is so annoying though, I prefer opt-in, let me pick the first time I try or use a sane default like Quicktime instead

lachlan_gray• 1 month ago

Yes, so many times I've been jumpscared by work-related audio in my playlists because of this

nottorp2• 1 month ago

Lovely. I don't press the play button by mistake much, but if i touch my BT headphones wrong...

drcongo2• 1 month ago

I actually had to look at my keyboard as I'd forgotten there even was a play button.

cestith4• 1 month ago

My mac opens Music for func + enter. Sometimes I accidentally have the function button held down as I hit enter. Then whatever app I’m trying to use to type loses its focus to this app I never use.

nottorp2• 1 month ago

It's on F8 on my laptop... of course i only remember when i try to do something and end up with Apple Music.

lxgr• 1 month ago

Reading this title made “The Miracle of Joey Ramone” by U2 play in my head.

dlev_pika5• 1 month ago

Oh man, throwback to when they forced the U2 albums on to everyone’s device for ReasonsTM

cryptoz• 1 month ago

It's not even a throwback. That U2 album still shows up if I accidentally open Apple Music. I haaaaate it. I disliked U2 before any of this, but now I have absolutely sworn to never ever listen to any of their music.

Google did the same thing with Transformers 2 I think. It still shows up as Purchased for me even though I absolutely did not purchase that. Good way to ensure I never ever watch any Transformers movie!

kps2• 1 month ago

Joey Ramone never wrote a song about U2.

+1 point for Joey Ramone.

sph• 1 month ago

The lack of applications like this is why macOS will always be a superior alternative to Linux.

/s for the sarcasm impaired

innagadadavida• 1 month ago

The same thing happens with iPhone and car bluetooth. It is super annyoing and many times, a podcast will be playing in the background while the car has FM/radio selected. This is incredibly frustrating and bad user experience. The worst part is it is not clear if this is Apple's fault or some buggy old firmware in the car's audio stack that is at fault (this happens consistently on 2017 Tesla Model S).

tzs• 1 month ago

I too have seen conflicts between CarPlay and the radio. My car's a Hyundai.

I mostly listen to the radio, with an occasional trip where I instead listen to a podcast or music via CarPlay.

What I've found greatly helps is when I finish a trip where I've used CarPlay after I park but before turning the car off I open my phone, open control center, tap the now playing widget, tap the symbol on that for output selection, and make sure it is set to iPhone Speaker. I then hit the Media button in the car and select FM. That starts the radio playing. Then I stop the radio and shut off the car.

Next time I use the car CarPlay connects normally but does NOT take over the media playback. If I hit the play button in the car it starts playing the radio.

This works fine for me because as I said I mostly listen to radio. It is not that big of a deal the once a week or so that I listen via CarPlay to do those extra steps at the end of a trip.

It would probably be a lot more annoying if I was frequently switching between radio and CarPlay.

In either case I would definitely like a setting somewhere that makes it so the play button in the car plays whatever source was playing the last time you turned off playback.

nepthar• 1 month ago

Thank you. Thank you.

skarz• 1 month ago

Every time I get in my car the Apple Music app prompts me to resubscribe with a full screen popup. Usually it tries 2-3 times before it stops.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

I use both Apple Music and Spotify, and normally use the former in the car because it resumes its state from the last shutdown while Spotify does not. But when I do use Spotify, Apple Music is the app that comes up the next time I start the car. Pretty annoying.

watersb• 1 month ago

From TFA, via StackExchange:

    launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

will quit the process responsible for the madness (rcd, the "remote control daemon").

You'll have to remember to re-load this thing if you want the default behavior. Or if you encounter other unexpected situations, to restore the default insanity.

It might be easier to run this app instead; then you have an icon in your GUI desktop environment and an app you can simply quit to restore defaults. Plus this app allows you to assign any app to the "Play" media event.

linsomniac• 1 month ago

Wow, thank you! I use and "like" youtube music, but it seems like every time I'd start a google meet call (IIRC) or otherwise interact with audio on my MacBook it would bring up Apple Music. If I quit it, it would pop back up the next time I had audio playing, but if I just left it running it would be fine. So I'd always have this Apple Music in my list of running apps. Kind of annoying.

I ran the above and then quit Apple Music and tried a few different things and so far it hasn't come back up.

Terretta2• 1 month ago

you have an icon ... simply quit

FTA:

Uh.. how do I quit this app?

The app has no Dock icon and no menubar icon so to quit it you'd need to do one of the following:

Launch Activity Monitor, find Music Decoy and press the button at the top

Run the following command in the Terminal:

  killall 'Music Decoy'

riazrizvi3• 1 month ago

It's very sad to see Apple using these lowbrow Microsoft tactics. Press ganging your users into launching your other shit product is brand cannibalism.

letrix• 1 month ago

But why wouldn't pressing the Play button, when no media session is available, not open the music player?

spankalee• 1 month ago

I don't use Apple Music, so opening their music player only wastes my attention and time. It happens if you accidentally press play on your headphones too. Then you need to quit Apple Music, for no good reason. And you can't uninstall it!

antoineMoPa3• 1 month ago

It cannot assume which media player I want to use, so the best course of action is to do nothing.

lgcmo• 1 month ago

Let me change the default music player

FinnKuhn• 1 month ago

Because it's not the music player I choose to use. I would be ok with it, if I could change the default to e.g. VLC or Spotify.

wk_end• 1 month ago

If there’s no media session available, “play” isn’t an action that makes any sense, so it shouldn’t do anything IMO.

deinonychus• 1 month ago

But why wouldn't the OS developer, when many people don't use Apple Music, not offer users the ability to pick what the key does?

unshavedyak• 1 month ago

not open the music player?

I'd be fine with it doing that if it actually opened what i listen with. The OS can clearly see i spend 100% of my time in another music player (Spotify), opening Apple Music is at best a poorly designed UX.

kqp• 1 month ago

It doesn’t, it opens Apple Music. Apple has a longstanding problem with giving their own apps privileged roles that they don’t expose to competitors. What concessions exist in browsers, maps, and music player are all the result of being forced into it by various lawsuits. Let’s not play games about what’s going on here.

albedoa• 1 month ago

This question is fascinating. The reason why pressing the Play button when no media session is available should not open the music player is because there is no media session available. Why would launching Apple Music be the desired or even expected behavior?

lynndotpy3• 1 month ago

One scenario:

1. You have an iPhone, a Macbook, and AirPods.

2. You are listening to a podcast or song on your iPhone using your AirPods.

3. You press your AirPods stem to pause the podcast or song on your iPhone.

4. You press your AirPods again, expecting to continue the podcast or song on your iPhone.

5. Your AirPods are now connected to your Mac, which is opening Apple Music. This takes a long time to complete.

Note that you can not remove the Music app from MacOS without serious compromises to MacOS. It is a slow, awful resource hog that I personally never want to use, and it rubs me the wrong way. My impression of Apple is much lower for it.

bloomca• 1 month ago

You can't uninstall Apple Music as far as I am aware, so it is not just a "music player" but a specific app, which I personally don't use. For the play button I at least see the point, but it opens it when you insert an audio CD, for example. Even Windows asks what to do in a notification.

mihaaly2• 1 month ago

Because this f%#n sh*t is jumping at you and is in your way promoting itself and want to configure and engage right away, or start some random item remained there when you in interim loss of your senses tried this crap, every time you press play instead of 8 or 9 by mistake, accidentally! But you don't want to start it, ever, anyway, that's why!

tolciho• 1 month ago

But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the annoying finder "spacebar may preview some random file hopefully without too many security vulns" (the low contrast design whereby you think Firefox is in foreground but it's actually the Finder is another bad design element that contributes to mixing up what the active app is), etc etc etc

overgard• 1 month ago

Because the key press is ambiguous and probably unintentional if nothing is open. If the question is "play what?" then it shouldn't guess

LollipopYakuza• 1 month ago

Spotify is open almost all of the time for me. If no song is playing, it's likely that it's paused. So I press play expecting it to resume, and sometimes Spotify is actually just not open.

vasco2• 1 month ago

Because i have no songs and never used apple music and every time it opens (because I pressed the key by mistake) within seconds it gets closed. Doesn't even need ai to figure this out.

shiandow• 1 month ago

I am utterly confused why pressing play would reasonably do anything other than playing something, or possibly pausing something.

inatreecrown2• 1 month ago

At least give the user the option.

mihaaly2• 1 month ago

These kind of things backfire very hard. I will never ever use Apple Music whatever products, never. Just like those drawn to this remedy like flies to sugar. They make so shitty and offensive user experience that supporting them by not avoiding the vicinity of it is a crime against humanity! Basically supporting bullying kind of behaviour.

Why not to have a simple way to turn this offensive behaviour off? Nonsense. It is intentionally offensive and forceful! Straight forceful behaviour that needs to be cut down at the sprout! Otherwise it will multiply and suffocate you down the line.

Too much of the product designers adapt this arrogant attitude, Apple is just a (sizeable) drop in the sea!

some_random• 1 month ago

Are you kidding me? You are not being "press ganged", when you try to play music the music player shipped with the OS is opened.

awakeasleep• 1 month ago

your point would carry more weight were it possible to switch the default music player

selectnull• 1 month ago

Apple Music can not be uninstalled. That's pretty much "press ganged" in my book.

iAMkenough• 1 month ago

I'm not trying to play music. I'm not even logged into the Apple Music app.

I'm just trying to put my bluetooth earbud in my ear to make a Teams call, and 1/3 of the time I get an onboarding prompt to join Apple Music on my work computer. Can't turn it off.

lysace• 1 month ago

They are obsessed with killing Spotify. That’s why they are doing such customer hostile things, despite being Apple.

Similar situation in the past: Microsoft vs Netscape.

riazrizvi3• 1 month ago

Yes. I've got no interest in leaving Spotify, I have the same loyalty to them as I do to Apple. Though of course anyone could screw it up. Then they lose me forever, like AT&T.

MetaWhirledPeas• 1 month ago

lowbrow Microsoft tactics

It's funny you say this because when I read the solution my first thought was that's such an Apple thing.

riazrizvi3• 1 month ago

Probably a generational and professional divide. I switched to Apple after a decade of coding on Windows, in 2006 when they were known for introducing UNIX as a commercial platform that effectively killed planned obsolescence in consumer software platforms. I'm still on their system today enjoying the fruits of that pivot that Steve Jobs effected with the NeXT team.

port11• 1 month ago

Not to defend Apple, but the button has worked like this since… forever? If you have another music player or YouTube or what have you, the button controls that instead.

r0fl• 1 month ago

I deleted mine because of this problem

I have the podcast app and so many times I would click an AirPod to resume and it would play a random song

stmw• 1 month ago

This is great! We need something similar for knowledgeconstructiond and several other overly insistent Apple software components.

tobadzistsini• 1 month ago

Or just switch to an Android phone.

hollowonepl2• 1 month ago

Only with GraphenOS

scraft2• 1 month ago

This software doesn't work on an Android phone.

cestith4• 1 month ago

I have an Android phone. It’s really not a replacement for a Macbook Pro though.

dlev_pika5• 1 month ago

I wish there was a way to stop it from ever appearing as spotlight result - when I type ‘music’, the first result (always) should be the music app I use, not their stuff

Terr_3• 1 month ago

Recently I've been using a mac more, and--even with the low bar of Windows default search--I've been very disappointed with Spotlight.

For example, it keeps polluting my results with things like preinstalled system music demo files. There's no option to exclude the location, nor to selectively disable "Garageband" results while keeping other apps I actually do use for work.

dlev_pika5• 1 month ago

Yeah, I hear you - and sometimes, when you get it to do what you want, some system update will force a reindex and you are back to square one.

On the bright side, there are a few power scripts that allow a much more custom experience (particularly if you are an all keyboard shortcuts person), but I am not the kind that wants extras there.

hollowonepl2• 1 month ago

This is nice, I recently vibe coded my own media player as I mostly listen to my own digitalized audio library and all software available today sucks to cover my scenario or consumes way too much resources by my taste… but random triggering Apple Music happens so often and it’s so annoying. Good article explaining how the trick works, should be easy to self-implement without installing another 3rd party software from nowhere known source

alin23• 1 month ago

Dev here, thanks!

Although it's a pretty well known source in the macOS apps community (lowtechguys.com) with source code available right on the front page (https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy) and the code does basically nothing. There's not much to be afraid of.

bound008• 1 month ago

PSA: Its Unix.

  sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app

edit: sorry about that. this used to work before the Music.app moved to /System/Applications

paulgb• 1 month ago

I wish it were that simple.

    ~: sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app       
    chmod: /Applications/Music.app: No such file or directory
    ~: sudo chmod -x /System/Applications/Music.app
    chmod: Unable to change file mode on /System/Applications/Music.app: Operation not permitted

(Mac OS Tahoe 26.5)

cestith4• 1 month ago

    % ls -la /System/Applications/Music.app/Contents/MacOS/Music
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  66201040 Apr 30 09:12 /System/Applications/Music.app/Contents/MacOS/Music

scraft2• 1 month ago

PSA: don't run random commands people on the internet tell you to run, it turns out those people haven't even run those commands themselves..

JBiserkov• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection

titzer4• 1 month ago

I still can't believe they killed iTunes. I used to have my entire digital music library in iTunes. Most of that was music I had ripped myself from CD, but I had a handful of albums I bought of iTunes and even some TV shows. When they wholesale abandoned iTunes and deleted from Mac OS in favor of...whatever Apple Music is, I knew I'd never trust them again.

I searched for some decent mp3 players for a while, and even used AIMP for a while, but nowadays I think I'll just vibe code my own with my own interface and rely on the local file system and folder mounts to do the job. I really love this new era where I can just use AI to build a custom thing for myself and forget about all the predatory crap out there, especially from the OS vendors. I don't need streaming, I don't want it. I would have kept buying albums off iTunes, but since it sucks so much I'll just buy it on CD, thanks.

asdff• 1 month ago

Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.

titzer4• 1 month ago

It's mostly that I want my own list management, key combinations, navigation, etc. Once the entire UI is my oyster, I realized I don't have to settle for how someone else decided to lay out the menus, etc. 25 years ago I would just learn all the key combos and be set, but 12 major iterations later, few to zero of those UI skills and muscle memory state has survived. So now, I can do my own and no one can take it away from me :)

hedora4• 1 month ago

I constantly have trouble with VLC (long standing bugs, where it gets confused and fails to play audio after dvd menu clicks, etc).

I’ve had mixed luck getting llm’s to configure mpv (which involved writing lua or something for basic functionality!), but there are audio sync issues with it.

I miss the days when something like totem would just work and default to playing with deinterlacing and audio set correctly.

Configuring VLC is like solving a 200 variable boolean satisfiability problem or something. Also, the workarounds for core bugs come and go over time, so Reddit suggests toggling removed settings.

talon8635• 1 month ago

I absolutely love vlc

The iOS app is such a permanently buggy mess that I eventually had to bail after years of use with persistent issues that wouldn’t get fixed, and new bugs popping up. It can play hyper obscure formats, but the basic UI functions are very unstable

socalgal23• 1 month ago

I think you must have very different needs if VLC is a substitute for iTunes/Music. For me, iTunes/Music is a music catalog app for managing my 9000+ MP3s with artists, album covers, playlisted based on various criteria, etc... where as VLC is an app for playing back single media files.

hedgehog• 1 month ago

iTunes and iPhoto both. Given how good the tools are getting, and how much existing sample code is available, it seems likely someone will do a good job of reincarnating them in the near future. Apple broke the apps I used most on the Mac and then they added the bubblicious design crime UI, no thanks.

al_borland6• 1 month ago

I found a WinAmp clone, written in Swift and AppKit, in the App Store yesterday. It was a month old, and from the description (ex. "No Electron, no bloat." and "No telemetry, no tracking, no accounts") it was almost certainly vibe coded. All the things it was saying were things I like, but written in a very AI way.

Stitch4223• 1 month ago

The specification would matter more than the source it produces. Specify it right and share it with the world. Code is basically a winamp skin on the OS level.

Matl• 1 month ago

There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org etc.

al_borland6• 1 month ago

You can turn off the cloud service in Apple Music and still use it with your local tracks and music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (which still exists).

I did this for most of last year. I had all local music in Apple Music, disabled the cloud stuff, and synced it all to my iPhone by plugging it in with a cable, as if it was an old iPod. It all still worked.

titzer4• 1 month ago

Fool me once.

auxiliarymoose• 1 month ago

Yep, I've been importing CDs to Apple Music (which I buy from my local music store) and adding them to my Android phone for personal listening. It's a great way to spend money on music in a way that supports local businesses!

dylan6043• 1 month ago

Turning off the cloud service just does the syncing thing right? What about turning off the Apple Music service so that the only thing visible is your local content? That's what pisses me off the most.

dijit• 1 month ago

You can, but basically every menu assumes Apple Music as a service, and its worse with each version.

You can technically still buy albums, but you can really tell its only there because it was forgotten about.

laleck• 1 month ago

Yes, but I have a big pet peeve about the offline experience.

In iOS Music, tapping the artist name on a song launches the artist’s cloud Apple Music page —- even if you’ve hidden paid Apple Music.

Disabling cellular data for the Music app fixes this by showing an album view of the downloaded music from the artist. However, the cloud version is unavoidable on WiFi. It’s a small but annoying example of how Apple made the classic experience worse to push their subscription product.

californical• 1 month ago

Check out Swinsian.

It is basically old iTunes with some UI improvements and modern features built around somebody who has their own library to manage. Been around for a long time.

It’s great software that I’m willing to pay for in today’s world for sure.

hedora4• 1 month ago

I had an OO perl replacement for iTunes back in the day (to learn OO perl, mostly). It had a web frontend, and also handled ripping and cd metadata with “insert disk, up arrow enter”. It failed to eject the disk iff there was a problem with the rip / transcode / metadata. I had 3-4 CDROMs in a desktop for parallelism.

Maybe I should have an LLM port to rust. It was under a thousand lines of code.

senderista• 1 month ago

`bless` your heart

ezfe2• 1 month ago

The Music app reads the same library and has the same core music-oriented functions as iTunes. Is the interface what you're missing?

bombcar3• 1 month ago

My main complaints are that it’s clearly store and subscription first, local music and playlists a distant second. Still works however.

sourcecodeplz2• 1 month ago

vibe code your own, implement some kind of yt-downloader? torrent downloader,etc, maybe some album art. hm might make one myself.

picofarad5• 1 month ago

Yt-dlp doesn't do metadata though, at least the way I hold it. So I end up with "unknown - Unknown - file title" or the like when they're playing.

Stuff designed to rip mp3 streams got this right.

I'm probably holding it wrong.

socalgal23• 1 month ago

That's the difference? I still use the Music app and it still behaves exactly as it did before they renamed it. I do not subscrbe to Apple Music. I still have my entire digital music libray in iTunes/Music and it functions as it always did.

forrestthewoods• 1 month ago

iTunes is the single worst most rage inducing software I have ever experienced. It is the only software that has brought myself and numerous family members to literal tears. Its concept of “syncing libraries” in the early iPhone era was so unbelievably broken.

I wish I believed in software hell because then I would be happy knowing that’s where iTunes existed.

rmunn2• 1 month ago

iTunes was responsible for my moving from iPhone to Android. My first phone was an iPhone 3G. But I could not simply transfer .mp3 files onto it from Linux; I had to run iTunes to transfer music onto the iPhone, and that meant loading up a VM running Windows just to run iTunes. (And pass the USB slot into the VM, and set up file sharing... it was all doable, and not that hard, but it wasn't simple).

So my next phone was an Android phone. And I could just plug it into a USB slot, and it showed up as an attached drive, the same way a thumbdrive did. Simple file transfer, at last.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and I have never bought an iPhone or iPad since.

chrisweekly• 1 month ago

Yeah, the smart playlists were awesome ("play unrated tracks I haven't heard in over a year, from albums I gave at least 3 stars") for those of us who went deep into curation. I miss it.

fizwidget• 1 month ago

I still use smart playlists in Apple Music. Your comment seems to imply they removed that functionality?

kmfrk• 1 month ago

Even worse when you're on Windows. What's the point of the cloud if it only works halfway decently on Mac.

Makes me feel like an idiot for doing something as outlandish as paying artists for their music.

MoonWalk3• 1 month ago

The Music app IS iTunes. They just renamed it and continued from there. I have all of my ripped music in there just like before; in fact, that's the ONLY music I have in my library.

So don't worry! The same trash UI is available to you... except now even worse, thanks to "Liquid Glass" and brain-dead decisions like moving the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen into the content-browser area... where they reside on a "transparent" bubble that overlaps other graphics and text.

thought_alarm2• 1 month ago

iTunes didn't go anywhere.

Just about everything I watch or listen to is served from the same iTunes Library I've had for over 20 years. It's more important to me now than it has ever been.

haunter• 1 month ago

foobar is the best https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

sylens• 1 month ago

If you keep your media accessible through Plex or Jellyfin, I recommend checking Chromatix[1] out - simple and no frills

[1] https://chromatix.app/

wodenokoto• 1 month ago

While I’m not sure Apple Music is the music app we deserved, iTunes had become this gigantic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of monstrosity and I think it was the right call to split it up.

Worse, the fun, here’s your music collection as a wall of cover images didn’t sit well with consumers who just wanted, I don’t know, get fed music and not curate themselves and I guess that’s how we ended up with mediocre.

nuker• 1 month ago

I still can't believe they killed iTunes. I used to have my entire digital music library in iTunes. Most of that was music I had ripped myself from CD ...

iTunes Match still exists, one of the handful of subs I pay for.

DerWOK• 1 month ago

To respect my folder structure and still have nice covers and playlists... - and playing all the usual formats… I use JRiver Media Center (99$) and FlacBox (iOS and MacOS).

ios-contractor• 1 month ago

I have Galaxy Buds Pro and I'm using this awesome client https://github.com/timschneeb/GalaxyBudsClient to disable all touches but sometimes the client isn't running in the background and the Music app just gets in my way, so this is great!

jxmorris12• 1 month ago

The app does absolutely no work in the background. It works by simply existing as a running process, thanks to having the same bundle identifier as the Music app.

I love clever, low-or-no-code engineering solutions like this. You typically need to understand a systems very deeply to reach this level of elegance. In this case, one has to understand exactly what happens when the play button is pressed in Mac OS, how bundle identifiers work, etc. And the outcome is an app with almost no code at all – just a collision – it's beautiful.

(As an aside, coding agents are terrible at this kind of thing; I'd guess Codex as of right now would write some overpowered application that polls in a loop looking for Music App starts and killing them)

lucideer• 1 month ago

On the contrary, this feels like a great (hypothetical) example of how to use coding agents effectively.

Codex as of right now would write some overpowered application that polls in a loop looking for Music App starts and killing them

Most human engineers would also do this. It's a relative rarity to find someone writing things this elegantly.

Similarly, if you asked an agent to "Stop the Apple Music app from launching", it would likely try to do what most humans would do. Otoh if you asked an agent to explain why the Apple Music app launches, based on the discoveries it presents to you from its investigation you would quickly discover for yourself that asking it to make a zero code app that collides with Music is the best course of action.

enos_feedler• 1 month ago

This is true. Outcomes correlate with the quality and depth of the conversation. The quality and depth correlates with the users understanding of computers

mikepurvis• 1 month ago

Absolutely. Coding agents as a research companion to the curious are phenomenal, but they also amplify all the worst tendencies of "when all you have is a hammer".

abustamam• 1 month ago

I always say that coding agents amplify existing practices. If an engineer decides to just throw code at the problem and iterate from there without an LLM, then they'll do something similar with an LLM, just at scale.

If their tendancy is to research a problem and understand why it's happening and design a solution, then their LLM assisted code will do that as well.

xiaoyu20062• 1 month ago

Reminds me that when I was in high school, my father used to regulate my gaming sessions with Apple ScreenTime. I changed the BundleIdentifier in my game's info.plist to `com.apple.systempreferences` and sign the .app with my own developer cert to bypass this. Was a lot of fun before got caught physically.

saagarjha5• 1 month ago

Did Apple attribute it solely based on bundle ID?

NamlchakKhandro• 1 month ago

Myyy codex with my skills would never! Never do such a thing.

boutell• 1 month ago

I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE!

I actually nuked my music library off my Mac to mitigate this problem, but it's still a nuisance when the app launches.

Thank you for sharing this!

rbbydotdev• 1 month ago

launching apple music on play, seems very similar to microsoft's early anti trust case and internet explorer

NobodyNada2• 1 month ago

I needed something like this a few months ago. I use my MacBook to run my (musical) keyboard rig for live performances, and use low-latency wireless headphones for monitoring. The headphones have a transmitter dongle that plugs into my laptop, and the dongle sends a "play/pause" command if I press a button on my headphones...causing Music to launch and begin playing audio out of my default output device. It doesn't even care whether my headphone transmitter is selected as the default output device; in a complex multi-device setup, I can press a button on my headphones and it will happily play audio out of some other device.

This is problematic because if I were to accidentally hit the button in the middle of a set, and it decides to default to whatever interface is connected to the P.A. system, then now I've just started blasting some random song at full volume to everyone in the venue.

(It's not an immediate problem for me anymore because I've reworked my hardware setup such that the dongle connects through my audio interface rather than directly to my laptop, meaning my laptop no longer receives "play/pause" commands from it. There were additional reasons for this rework, but preventing this misbehavior was absolutely part of the consideration.)

It's absurd that a premium device marketed to creative professionals has unconfigurable behavior like this which is so unacceptable for a live show.

scrumper• 1 month ago

That'd be a terrifying setup for me as a live player! I'm curious where you found low latency wireless headphones though.

Have a look at Loopback - very mature app now. I use this for doing live and studio routing, you set a live profile so that only your soft synths actually get an output and Music (and FaceTime, system, whatever) get sent to the musical equivalent of /dev/null. So an accidental press of "Play" has no effect (beyond perhaps catastrophic stuttering as Music.app opens.)

My laptop is disconnected at the moment so it's full of "missing device" notifications but this screenshot[1] will give you an idea. Profiles on the left, apps in the next column, routing to mixer channels (I have a multichannel interface) next and then "monitor devices" which can be multiplexed.

[1]https://imgur.com/gG1hG2c

NobodyNada2• 1 month ago

The headphones are from AIAIAI: https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2-studio-wireless

Loopback looks nice, but I prefer to keep the routing entirely within my DAW (or my interface where possible) to keep latency to a minimum, particularly since I'm already using wireless headphones that add 10ms latency.

Another mitigation I now have is to use an aggregate device that has BlackHole on the first two channels rather than the main outputs. That way, if I accidentally start playing audio, it gets harmlessly sent to the void; and it also means I can easily capture and forward it in my DAW if I actually want to play PC audio (for example, listening to a recording during a rehearsal).

delduca• 1 month ago

I use https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

ghrl• 1 month ago

Yeah, I used that too on my last Mac. But the page explicitly states the benefits of this approach (preventing it from launching all together without doing anything vs listening for the launch and killing it). It also does not use a menu bar icon, which is also good considering the limited space.

brynnbee2• 1 month ago

Installed, thanks!

blinded• 1 month ago

I still use itunes for music that I've purchased. But all the features now push you towards streaming and its exhausting.

throfktjj• 1 month ago

Just uninstall it! Mac is simple if you know how to use it!

saagarjha5• 1 month ago

Clearly you do not.

jorisw• 1 month ago

I had been using the app noTunes for this.

Cider9986• 1 month ago

I have a better one:

  curl https://alx.sh | sh

https://asahilinux.org/fedora

vasco2• 1 month ago

This comment is almost at the quality of "install gentoo" but it lacks the panache and vintage that 4chan has.

bigyabai3• 1 month ago

This retort would hit a lot differently if macOS wasn't an advertisement-infested shithole of an OS in 2026.

I'm a classic macOS fan, but it's time for us to admit that it's not a premium OS anymore. It's a service upsell layer.

picofarad5• 1 month ago

The difference being that install Gentoo would be 15 pages of instructions, not just pipe this into sh.

If I were on my computer, it'd actually link the Gentoo script that we used to bootstrap it on AWS.

2dvisio• 1 month ago

Sharing as I’ve not seen this mentioned by anyone. I have achieved something similar with Karabiner and the custom reassignment of the play button to actually run Spotify and play the last song from there rather than Apple Music and it worked like a charm.

emaro• 1 month ago

I tried to stop this a while ago and searching the internet did not yield great results, so I ended up creating a Shortcut that runs when the Music app opens to close it again. This actually worked well until that time I wanted to use the Music app for real.

So annoying and not great UX from Apple imo. Thanks for this.

gausswho• 1 month ago

After I discovered my Mac Mini was downloading animated wallpapers until filling up 80Gb of space, then doing it all over again every time I reboot, I decided I'd had enough and installed LuLu firewall and blocked every outbound to apple.com. I don't use any of their services anyway, and some of them approach malware suspicion (keyboard input analytics daemon??)

cj• 1 month ago

I encourage you to look into Little Snitch.

Ringz• 1 month ago

Whats the difference between LS and LuLu. I have an old LS license and after I switched to LuLu I didn’t miss anything.

hod6654• 1 month ago

Is there a consensus on what can be blocked in LuLu/LS without breaking any functionality?

partloyaldemon• 1 month ago

Ok. Now help me get spotlight to index my mirror-style Google Drive. Seems only this level of genius could accomplish it.

ronnier• 1 month ago

Would also love to stop the dictionary app from opening

kibae• 1 month ago

Also the ability to uninstall bloatware like Chess. When I switched my browser away from Chrome I kept typing "c, h, return" in spotlight out of habit and kept opening Chess.

spectre3d2• 1 month ago

Like Quicksilver, Alfred, Launchbar, Butler, Raycast, and many other launchers, you can train Spotlight to always launch the same thing depending on what abbreviation you type.

The next time you go to launch Chrome, type ch and then use the arrow keys to navigate to the Chrome result to launch it.

You may have to do that for one more launch. After that it should always launch Chrome with ‘ch’.

Terretta2• 1 month ago

On the plus side in MacOS 27, once it is playing, dragging the playhead makes it grumpy and to fix it you get to quit or go full screen:

- Media Playback Known Issues: In apps like TV, Podcasts, and Music, the window controls may become unresponsive after dragging the playhead to adjust the playback position. (177984877)

- Workaround: Use keyboard shortcuts or the menu bar to close, minimize, or enter full screen mode.

• • •

Super clunky compared to the imminently more practical workaround for wrong-size gifs in Messages, STOP LOOKING AT IT:

- Messages Known Issues: GIFs and pasted images might render as the incorrect size. (177657977)

- Workaround: Scroll until that message is offscreen

microflash• 1 month ago

Since I don't care about Apple Music at all, I just lock the ~Music/Music folder. It prevents the app to launch while still keeping the key functional in other apps.

7777777phil• 1 month ago

Thank You!

P-Nuts• 1 month ago

brew install notunes

Another fix for this bollocks

flawn• 1 month ago

https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

this is the OG app.

abhinavsns• 1 month ago

There is another app called notunes that I have been using for ages.

dkga• 1 month ago

I signed up for Apple’s subscription which includes Apple Music. We are a Spotify family, but I then cancelled our premium subscription to avoid duplicate spending. I embraced Apple Music with an open heart in spite of the reservation from my family members. I liked that DJ feature that joined songs. But everything else felt subpar to Spotify. In particular, with AM I feel that they were always pushing US pop/rap music to me, even as I was listening everything from old Tunisian singers to Denmark’s Magtens Korridorer. But overall it just felt that Spotify folks really liked music as an Art form, whereas AM really wanted you to listen to whatever they were featuring/pedalling. Like that song lyrics translation feature introduced by Spotify - only if you enjoy songs in languages you might not yet understand you would think of such a nice feature!

nrabulinski• 1 month ago

Counter anecdote, Apple Music is constantly pushing new niche artists to me whenever I check the home page. I never use radio or discover features, but the personalized results are actually pretty good. I’ve been using Apple Music for close to a decade now

brikym• 1 month ago

I'be been using a tool called NoTunes for years. https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes Fuck that app and fuck your subscription Apple.

RgrTheShrubbr• 1 month ago

For everything that Apple does great. They really do drop the ball on the dumbest things. I used to use iTunes in place of the Apple Music app for my library and connecting my old iPods, and now with Retroactive being discontinued I haven't found a great alternative other than just buying an old Mac and I unfortunately don't have the space for one.

philippemnoel• 1 month ago

I've been wanting this for so long. This is so clever.

Slightly concerned Apple would patch this by preventing others from using the same bundle identifier as their official apps, though?

masonwan• 1 month ago

Thanks for the solution! I've been bothered with this issue for ages.

Many times Apple Music also triggered by the Bluetooth devices which is super annoying.

Apple really needs to implement a way to remove Apple Music completely.

thought_alarm2• 1 month ago

I use the built-in `hidutil` utility to remap F3-F9 to my preferred keys.

F3/F4 are remapped to the keyboard backlight brightness.

F5-F9 are remapped to be plain old function keys.

This post has a lot of great info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555475

This is the mapping I use on an M1 MacBook:

    hidutil property --set '{
      "UserKeyMapping":[
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000FF0100000010,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000009},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c00000221,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00FF00000008},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cf,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003e},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x000000010000009b,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x00070000003f},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b4,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000040},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000cd,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000041},
        {"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x0000000c000000b3,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x000700000042}
      ]
     }'

brynnbee2• 1 month ago

This was good info, thanks! Didn't think it'd be possible.

ElijahLynn• 1 month ago

brew install notunes

Then launch it once to say you approve

startup Ventura and later: Navigate to System Settings Select General Select Login Items Click the + under Open at Login and select noTunes

https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

thallavajhula• 1 month ago

I really like your approach. Smart. Personally though, I like AM opening up when I hit the PLAY button on my keyboard.

vachina• 1 month ago

Or delete the Music app… zero processes required.

saagarjha5• 1 month ago

How?

melonpan7• 1 month ago

This is clever, I typically use Cider on my Mac or Linux machine, the notification that music is trying to play from another device (the cheapest plan only supports 1 simultaneous stream) is really annoying. I think it happens when I connect or take off my Airpods connected to my iPhone.

martin_drapeau• 1 month ago

I'm so happy to have fallen on this. Apple Music launching on my Mac when I put on my AirPods drives me crazy.

1011121314152• 1 month ago

I can't go into music app because it blocked b a school and its guilderland

1011121314152• 1 month ago

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spotify-music-and-podcasts/id3...

akeck• 1 month ago

I vibe coded a similar thing using a combo of launchctl commands and Apple Script (closes Music app if it's open) with MS Copilot of all things. It works pretty well.

longnguyen• 1 month ago

This is nice. Somewhat related, I've been using this free, open-source app called BeardedSpice[0]. It solves my pet peeve of the media key doesn't always control the right app/browser tab.

BeardedSpice is a menubar application for Mac OSX that allows you to control web based media players and some native apps with the media keys found on Mac keyboards. It is an extensible application that works with Chrome (Canary, Yandex, Chromium) and Safari, and can control any tab with an applicable media player.

[0] https://beardedspice.github.io

news_hacker• 1 month ago

The MacMediaKeyForwarder works like a charm:

https://github.com/quentinlesceller/macmediakeyforwarder

kevinmiller452• 1 month ago

I'd rather just use the launchctl method. Disabling the play button is fine by me since I control music from Spotify directly.

adamgreen795• 1 month ago

This is clever but I worry about running yet another background app just to fix Apple's dumb design choice.

gcardone_• 1 month ago

I hate how MacOS would start Apple Music every time I accidentally tapped my earbuds. To disable it I used an even lower tech solution, which works on corp laptops that don't allow installing arbitrary software:

1. Open System Settings

2. Navigate to Screen Time -> App Limits -> Add Limit...

3. Select "Music" and set an "Every Day" limit of 0 minutes.

Geste• 1 month ago

I liked it but realised I couldn't watch anything on VLC while this ran. Too bad.

carte_blanche• 1 month ago

I've been using noTunes to do this for years, works like a charm: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

Also a bit unfortunate that a software like this has to exist in the first place.

Stop the Apple Music app from launching

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