Stop the Apple Music app from launching

> 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.

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.

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

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"

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??)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I have a better one:

  curl https://alx.sh | sh

https://asahilinux.org/fedora

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.

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