> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Yeah, right? Seems obvious to me. If I press "Backspace" and there is nothing to go back to, or to remove, I expect the key to do nothing. Same for Escape, or Volume Up, or whatever. If it can't do what's expected, it does nothing.
Feels like at one point all the people who spent decades building OSes and desktop environment left Apple and Microsoft, and the people left are brand new developers who only been using computers for the last 10 years or something. Or something something executives/management, whatever fits your worldview better.
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.
or turn it off entirely because guess what? Most people are accidently hitting this play/pause button or they hit it thinking youtube is going to respond and instead they get Apple's seriously shite music player. classic apple no respect for me and my choices.
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"
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.
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.
~: 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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
- I'll pause a podcast I'm listening to on my iPhone or iPad, or just take my AirPods out of my ear for a moment
- Like 5 minutes later, I'll squeeze the AirPod stem to resume playback. It will instead think that I want to play Apple Music on my Mac for some fucking reason.
I don't think this behavior can be easily customized (somebody let me know if it can!)
Just this week I was stuck in this state where my AirPods were receiving audio from the iPhone in my pocket (intended), but play/pause commands from the AirPods were sent to my Macbook in the other room.
I had to start using noTunes years ago because whenever I accidentally touched or removed my (Sony / non-Apple) bluetooth headphones, iTunes/Music would pop up without fail. Apparently they sent a "play" button press, so the application would pop up. Because it's a system application, you cannot delete it, there's no way to override the key, there's no way to disable it. So noTunes has been running for 7 years straight on my Mac.
I use play/pause to start/stop the music on whatever I was listening to music on (Spotify usually, sometimes brain.fm). It's a background action, play music or stop music, no change to flow.
If Spotify isn't running for whatever reason, or sometimes even if it is, Apple Music decides that what I actually want is for it to steal focus for 5 seconds while it loads, switch to a full screen window and pester me to subscribe.
So in my case, the button click is intentional but the response isn't.
For me it's my AirPods launching the Music app, something I rarely want. At the same time, it's one click in the menu bar to disable noTunes in the rare circumstances I want to use the Music app.
It's made worse by the fact that I use my AirPods across my personal devices and my work Mac, the latter of which I have to switch them to manually (since my work Mac is not on my personal iCloud account).
Anyway, however it happens, I often found the Music app launching on my personal and work Macs, and noTunes prevents it.
For me it mostly happens when I press play on my airpods. If they connect to my mac instead of my phone it opens up apple music if I don't have another media player open.
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!
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.
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
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).
> 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)
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.
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.
One developer AFAIK, been around for a long time.
It’s great software that I’m willing to pay for in today’s world for sure.
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.
There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org etc.
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.
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.
Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.
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.
But why wouldn't pressing the Play button, when no media session is available, not open the music player?
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!
If there’s no media session available, “play” isn’t an action that makes any sense, so it shouldn’t do anything IMO.
Yeah, right? Seems obvious to me. If I press "Backspace" and there is nothing to go back to, or to remove, I expect the key to do nothing. Same for Escape, or Volume Up, or whatever. If it can't do what's expected, it does nothing.
Feels like at one point all the people who spent decades building OSes and desktop environment left Apple and Microsoft, and the people left are brand new developers who only been using computers for the last 10 years or something. Or something something executives/management, whatever fits your worldview better.
No other key on my keyboard opens an application. I don't see why there should be one special key that operates that way.
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?
> 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.
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.
or turn it off entirely because guess what? Most people are accidently hitting this play/pause button or they hit it thinking youtube is going to respond and instead they get Apple's seriously shite music player. classic apple no respect for me and my choices.
It cannot assume which media player I want to use, so the best course of action is to do nothing.
It's very reasonable that pressing "play" opens the default music player. They should let you choose.
Let me change the default music player
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"
Yes, so many times I've been jumpscared by work-related audio in my playlists because of this
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.
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.
Yeah, this sucks
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
> 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?
It cannot be uninstalled
^ How can you make such an obviously wrong statement?
Drag Music app to Trash, and that it! Like you do with any other app.
I hope this is a joke. You cannot delete it. It's considered "system" software.
The (shitty) logic here is that you don’t ‘own’ the OS, but merely rent it, so “deal with it”
cough cough hey EU you hearing this shit?
If you for whatever reason do not want the security benefits offered by SIP, you can turn it off.
Of course, doing so just to get rid of Apple Music would tend to be a bit crazy.
Same! And there is no obvious close button etc on the overtop blocking modal dialog either. It’s a dark pattern.
PSA: Its Unix.
I wish it were that simple.
(Mac OS Tahoe 26.5)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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
launching apple music on play, seems very similar to microsoft's early anti trust case and internet explorer
Reading this title made “The Miracle of Joey Ramone” by U2 play in my head.
Oh man, throwback to when they forced the U2 albums on to everyone’s device for ReasonsTM
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
This is great! We need something similar for knowledgeconstructiond and several other overly insistent Apple software components.
From TFA, via StackExchange:
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.
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.
> 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:
Lovely. I don't press the play button by mistake much, but if i touch my BT headphones wrong...
I actually had to look at my keyboard as I'd forgotten there even was a play button.
I've been using this for a while now: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
Source code for this one: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy
It seems I need to leave this running for it to work? So it's not just a configuration changes.
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.
Interesting, there's always been a menu bar icon for it for me. You can hide it, though.
I'm using "Music Decoy" and I don't see one. Possible noTunes has one.
Same. noTunes works perfectly. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
noTunes is one of the first things I install on a new mac.
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?
For me, this constantly happens:
- I'll pause a podcast I'm listening to on my iPhone or iPad, or just take my AirPods out of my ear for a moment
- Like 5 minutes later, I'll squeeze the AirPod stem to resume playback. It will instead think that I want to play Apple Music on my Mac for some fucking reason.
I don't think this behavior can be easily customized (somebody let me know if it can!)
Just this week I was stuck in this state where my AirPods were receiving audio from the iPhone in my pocket (intended), but play/pause commands from the AirPods were sent to my Macbook in the other room.
I had to start using noTunes years ago because whenever I accidentally touched or removed my (Sony / non-Apple) bluetooth headphones, iTunes/Music would pop up without fail. Apparently they sent a "play" button press, so the application would pop up. Because it's a system application, you cannot delete it, there's no way to override the key, there's no way to disable it. So noTunes has been running for 7 years straight on my Mac.
I use play/pause to start/stop the music on whatever I was listening to music on (Spotify usually, sometimes brain.fm). It's a background action, play music or stop music, no change to flow.
If Spotify isn't running for whatever reason, or sometimes even if it is, Apple Music decides that what I actually want is for it to steal focus for 5 seconds while it loads, switch to a full screen window and pester me to subscribe.
So in my case, the button click is intentional but the response isn't.
For me it's my AirPods launching the Music app, something I rarely want. At the same time, it's one click in the menu bar to disable noTunes in the rare circumstances I want to use the Music app.
It's made worse by the fact that I use my AirPods across my personal devices and my work Mac, the latter of which I have to switch them to manually (since my work Mac is not on my personal iCloud account).
Anyway, however it happens, I often found the Music app launching on my personal and work Macs, and noTunes prevents it.
For me it mostly happens when I press play on my airpods. If they connect to my mac instead of my phone it opens up apple music if I don't have another media player open.
The lack of applications like this is why macOS will always be a superior alternative to Linux.
/s for the sarcasm impaired
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this is the default behavior for a supposedly premium operating system.
The OS isn't supposed to be premium since it's free, does that help figure it out?
You can't buy the OS directly, but it certainly isn't free.
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.
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.
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
Thank you. Thank you.
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).
Yes. Yes. Thank you. I wanted something like for years.
Or just switch to an Android phone.
Only with GraphenOS