Stop the Apple Music app from launching(lowtechguys.com) |
Stop the Apple Music app from launching(lowtechguys.com) |
I have the podcast app and so many times I would click an AirPod to resume and it would play a random song
sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app ~: 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
% 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/MusicSource code for this one: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy
Another fix for this bollocks
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.
/s for the sarcasm impaired
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.
The rest of us ask for a customizable experience.
- 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!)
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Maybe I should have an LLM port to rust. It was under a thousand lines of code.
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.
I wish I believed in software hell because then I would be happy knowing that’s where iTunes existed.
this is the OG app.
You have to do it once per file type but it's once and done.
>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.
- 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
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.
I'm by no way an Apple fan, but why not uninstall the app if you don't need it?
So annoying and not great UX from Apple imo. Thanks for this.
curl https://alx.sh | sh
+1 point for Joey Ramone.
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!
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist
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.
I ran the above and then quit Apple Music and tried a few different things and so far it hasn't come back up.
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'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!
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'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.
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.
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!
Thought if I remember correctly, search was still showing it, which was a little annoying. But it depends on how much you search.
I'm currently using the service right now, so I can't really check if anything has changed since last year when I was doing it.
On MacOS I think it opens to the online home page, but I use it so infrequently I'm not sure. I pretty much only use it to buy music from iTunes.
It is shockingly easy to build an opinionated UI for these things in a web browser. You need to implement m3u generation (or use a js web player), and some sort of hierarchical hyperlink based nav that matches your muscle memory. You should be able to use an existing service to grab cover art and metadata for newly ripped disks (unless those services disappeared over the years).
If you want to use a native GUI/TUI toolkit, I’d be shocked if an LLM had any trouble laying it out after a few rounds of refinement. (It definitely will not have any trouble doing this for web stuff.)
These days you can delete the album from your library and set the Music app to not automatically download your purchases. If you want to go an extra mile, you can login to your iTunes account to view your purchases and hide it there too.
Internet Explorer bundling was an instruction manual!
Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO. If nothing was paused, it should do nothing. Else, you open a pandora's box of possibly wrong choices that the user then has to close.
> you can uninstall it anytime
I'm sure it tells you that, but did you actually try?
The uninstall button is a lie: You cannot remove the app, you can only roll it back to some mandatory minimum version. Here, verbatim:
> Do you want to uninstall all updates to this Android System app?
If you "uninstall", the app still exists, and your only choice is to surrender and update it again.
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.
Drag Music app to Trash, and that it! Like you do with any other app.
- Unable to drag from the Applications drawer to Trash
- Unable to drag from the Spotlight search to Trash
- Unable to drag from Finder (in ~/Applications) to Trash
- Unable to delete (in Finder)
- Unable to delete (through rm in terminal).
This has been a bother for years across MacOS versions and I've tried variations of these, personally.
In the future, you might consider not denigrating others in this way. It is hard to save face when you are wrong. And it is hard for others to provide an avenue for you to save face while also pointing out that your statements are not true.
My repeated attempts to remove from Dock and hide it all failed: half the time I remove my ear buds the Apple Music pops up in the middle of my screen and auto-enables itself in the Dock...
Go ahead and try. It's not like "any other app".
Of course, doing so just to get rid of Apple Music would tend to be a bit crazy.
We're on a tech forum where everyone here is aware (or at least can understand) how SIP is useful for the security model on MacOS. But for plenty of people with this problem, SIP is only the thing you learn can disable so you can immediately make your life a little better.
The crazy ones are Apple here, since this problem should not require disabling SIP to fix.