> 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)
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.
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".
This is true. Outcomes correlate with the quality and depth of the conversation. The quality and depth correlates with the users understanding of computers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've only ever used Apple Music with local content. On iOS the only indication to me that non-local content is even possible is the radio tab at the bottom of the screen.
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.
I've recently tried syncing local content to my phone, but to find that content on the phone is difficult. The phone really wants to show me Apple Music stuff. I have to Library->Downloaded->Songs. Going to Artists or Albums just shows me "Download Music to Listen Offline". I really just don't want to spend the time I previously spent on my iTunes library all over again. I was really just trying to quick&dirty add content. They've made this unnecessarily difficult and I despise them for it.
Just go to the Library tab in the phone app. That's where your own stuff is located.
I have over 8000 songs synced to my phone, 100% from local files on my computer.
I never activate the "library sync" BS that Apple tries to force on you, because historically it has replaced your copies with incorrect or "remastered" (AKA dynamically compressed to hell) versions from Apple servers.
I've even caught it switching "library sync" on without permission during an update.
I don't know what you're doing differently then. When I open the Music App, it goes straight to my Library. The only items in there are songs I've synced to my phone. I've never seen anything else or known it to behave differently.
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!
I don't really understand what you mean - yes, it is designed for Apple Music, a tab for browsing for new music, etc.
But it still has library views for songs, albums, artists, and playlists. That's the whole thing. Additional tabs to support modern music streaming don't devalue those tabs.
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 :)
I strongly recommend going this route (speaking from experience).
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.)
I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.
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
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.
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.
I manage my 9000+ MP3s with the filesystem. It has all the cover art, it's organized any way I want, and has playlists based on any criteria I want. Then I use any music player I want, and can drop the files onto any device I want.
What filesystem manages in multiple ways? Or are you using symlinks so you have one collection by artist, another by album, another by genre, another by year, etc...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this is going to finally bring about the year of the open source desktop.
I’ll happily install that if I can see the source code, read it all in a sitting, and it is not terrible.
(Note that, in this model, if I want to futz with key bindings or other UI tweaks, I can just ask an LLM to change it. No configuration UI required! Just like evilwm.)
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
And then load up MusicBrainz Picard to tag it after-the-fact; I've found some cases, usually on more obscure music, where Youtube metadata was close to right but wrong on some details. But it had enough details to allow Picard to find the correct album, and then the file(s) was/were tagged correctly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Probably gaming metrics. “87% of users used my team's program this month!” Who cares if 87% of those did it unintentionally? That's some other team's problem.
Exactly this.
The telemetry stats will bubble up to some level of management and it will show, "after making the play key launch the music app more people are using it". That's it. Explanations won't fit on the slide deck. In fact it probably isn't even that much, it would just be a graph with "line goes up" after the making play launch the music app.
My Mac didn't come with any keyboard at all, so I'm still using my keyboard that has Circle, Triangle, Square and Cross in the top-right for my Mac as well.
Dating Fireball just posted about how broken SwiftUI is for basic things AppKit was doing correctly in the late 90s (undo/redo)[0].
I think peak productivity for desktops was probably hit about 10 years ago. Most things since then are worse, and the best things from macOS (drag and drop everything nearly anywhere, consistent keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, scriptability of everything, etc.) were never copied by other systems.
Now systems are being designed to follow Node JS-style development which doesn’t work like a normal thing anywhere and native apps are just as bad as electron apps from a usability perspective…
At least they can be vibe coded since Interface Builder is no longer needed?
I think playing something when I hit the play button makes a lot of sense. (The headphones auto-play is a bit less obvious than the keyboard key, I would probably want that to do nothing in this case.)
The issue IMHO is that this is not configurable. Apple Music may even be a reasonable default (being the built-in music player). But it should provide options for Apple Music, whatever other apps I have installed, or nothing.
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!
Are you talking about the pixel buds app? They ask you on setup if you want it installed, and you can uninstall it anytime. Seems pretty far from "mandatory".
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.
> 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. So yes, that "system app" is (as far as Google is concerned) absolutely "mandatory" on my phone.
Apps I can't uninstall on my Pixel 9 or 10 (I forget): Gemini, Google TV, My Pixel, Now Playing, Screenshots, Wallet, Weather, YT Music
Some of those might be system level stuff, but I don't know what the heck Google TV is, and I certainly am not signing up for whtever "YT Music" is. Probably some spotify subscription thing they will cancel like they did google play music and whatever came before that. But I can't uninstall any of these, or even delete the icons. They're just visual trash I can't hide from the launcher.
I don't trust the digital music stores anymore, cumulatively I have probably $100 worth of music I've bought across 3-4 music stores in the last 25 years and I can't access any of it anymore. Meanwhile my MP3 collection and WinAmp from high school continue to work without issue.
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.
Because this OS developer is also trying to sell you their Music service subscription. I'm sure having this setting would hurt some of their internal KPIs and therefore would never be implemented.
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.
sometimes you can have a youtube video that is paused, and you hit play/pause button thinking it will unpause it but for whatever reason that video seems to not be registering as being unpausable so OSX thinks there is nothing to unpause, so it opens itunes, it's one of the reasons apple was cited under geneva convention violations for unusual weaponry last year
Mainly want that button for pausing a video to play music or vice versa. Don’t love the logic (which will it play, or pause?) but maybe it’s about as good as it could be without more complexity like first press pauses background playback, second press begins foreground playback. (Could probably script that now that I say it, an easy Hammerspoon or something.)
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.
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.
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.
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!
There are multiple different sources that the user might want to start playing. Browser tab A/B/C (example: web radios), a music application or music service website in a tab that's not even opened yet (eg: spotify), the last video tab they opened (ex: youtube).
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.
In my experience, this is a more frequent issue. At least 1 time per day, I hit play hoping to play Spotify in a browser tab or some radio tab and for some reason it opens Apple Music instead. Sometimes it could be an issue on my side, ex: the tab is dead or not even opened.
But whatever, the experience is bad: I have to wait for the Music application startup time, then click the context menu and select "Quit Apple Music". It feels like being forced to watch a product ad. Opening Apple Music is never what I want. Imagine if pressing shift opened TextEdit by default, that would be silly. Or doing CMD-v where you can't paste would automatically pop up some random app.
I feel like no machine response is a correct UX pattern in this case. The absence of sound playback would indicate to me that I need to do something else to play sound.
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
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if SwiftDefaultApps might yield different results compared to the Cmd+I menu? It's a crude-yet-still-working preference pane for setting default apps in System Settings, rather than using example files:
I'd say having to turn off System Integrity Protection as a prerequisite to uninstalling a music player is crazy. Spoken as someone who likes MacOS and Apple Music.
The Apple Music thing bothers me and adds friction to my life every single day that I use MacOS.
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.
You can not do this on MacOS, at least on MacOS 26 on Apple Silicon without SIP disabled. I was:
- 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.
As a non power of Mac (only recently switched), I'll definitely try this.
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...
The Dock just contains a bunch of shortcuts. The app itself lives in the /Applications folder along with the rest of them that you can choose to add to your dock (by just dragging them down there and letting a spot open up for it).
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
There was a website to remove it completely from your library, it launched in 2014 and was up for many years, but is now gone.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Maybe it's tired to you. The reason why it's a decade-old shtick is because Apple spent a decade adopting Microsoft-tier design patterns. They push advertisements in the OS and first-party apps, and then refuse to improve the experience with iterative updates. It is an ongoing issue.
> No option’s perfect.
Bullshit. I've used Linux and Windows PCs before, I have not heard a single user want Apple Music to open when they put on their headphones. There is a perfect solution, but you lack the willpower to call Apple out for dark patterns. This should only be an opt-in feature, full-stop.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
~: 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
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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".
This is true. Outcomes correlate with the quality and depth of the conversation. The quality and depth correlates with the users understanding of computers
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.
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.
Did Apple attribute it solely based on bundle ID?
Myyy codex with my skills would never! Never do such a thing.
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
That's what I meant by cloud services. It hides the Apple Music part so it defaults to your local stuff.
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.
I've only ever used Apple Music with local content. On iOS the only indication to me that non-local content is even possible is the radio tab at the bottom of the screen.
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.
VLC on iPhone has served me more reliably than Apple Music.
I've recently tried syncing local content to my phone, but to find that content on the phone is difficult. The phone really wants to show me Apple Music stuff. I have to Library->Downloaded->Songs. Going to Artists or Albums just shows me "Download Music to Listen Offline". I really just don't want to spend the time I previously spent on my iTunes library all over again. I was really just trying to quick&dirty add content. They've made this unnecessarily difficult and I despise them for it.
Just go to the Library tab in the phone app. That's where your own stuff is located.
I have over 8000 songs synced to my phone, 100% from local files on my computer.
I never activate the "library sync" BS that Apple tries to force on you, because historically it has replaced your copies with incorrect or "remastered" (AKA dynamically compressed to hell) versions from Apple servers.
I've even caught it switching "library sync" on without permission during an update.
Please re-read what I wrote. I know where the local stuff is. It doesn't fix the glitch that app is
That's not reflected by your comment, which I read and directly replied to:
"to find that content on the phone is difficult"
How? You tap Library, then Songs. There's all your music.
I don't know what you're doing differently then. When I open the Music App, it goes straight to my Library. The only items in there are songs I've synced to my phone. I've never seen anything else or known it to behave differently.
Sadly it doesn't quite go away even when you've turned everything off: https://davids.town/dear-apple-please-fix-ios-music
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!
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.
Buy albums from Bandcamp. You can download them in multiple different formats and the artist gets one of the best cuts
Fool me once.
The Music app reads the same library and has the same core music-oriented functions as iTunes. Is the interface what you're missing?
My main complaints are that it’s clearly store and subscription first, local music and playlists a distant second. Still works however.
I don't really understand what you mean - yes, it is designed for Apple Music, a tab for browsing for new music, etc.
But it still has library views for songs, albums, artists, and playlists. That's the whole thing. Additional tabs to support modern music streaming don't devalue those tabs.
On the phone it always defaults to searching the online store/music, instead of the local songs.
The Mac app version is less annoying in that way as it seems to vaguely remember what you were looking at.
There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org etc.
Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.
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 :)
I strongly recommend going this route (speaking from experience).
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.)
I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.
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
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.
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.
I manage my 9000+ MP3s with the filesystem. It has all the cover art, it's organized any way I want, and has playlists based on any criteria I want. Then I use any music player I want, and can drop the files onto any device I want.
What filesystem manages in multiple ways? Or are you using symlinks so you have one collection by artist, another by album, another by genre, another by year, etc...
I won’t say vlc is my favorite UI but it does all of this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
`bless` your heart
Yeah but then no rust comment...
Easy as [mpg]123
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.
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.
I think this is going to finally bring about the year of the open source desktop.
I’ll happily install that if I can see the source code, read it all in a sitting, and it is not terrible.
(Note that, in this model, if I want to futz with key bindings or other UI tweaks, I can just ask an LLM to change it. No configuration UI required! Just like evilwm.)
> 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.
If you keep your media accessible through Plex or Jellyfin, I recommend checking Chromatix[1] out - simple and no frills
[1] https://chromatix.app/
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).
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.
I still use smart playlists in Apple Music. Your comment seems to imply they removed that functionality?
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.
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.
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.
vibe code your own, implement some kind of yt-downloader? torrent downloader,etc, maybe some album art. hm might make one myself.
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.
Add --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata
And then load up MusicBrainz Picard to tag it after-the-fact; I've found some cases, usually on more obscure music, where Youtube metadata was close to right but wrong on some details. But it had enough details to allow Picard to find the correct album, and then the file(s) was/were tagged correctly.
Yeah, used to rip online radios with a winamp plugin. it placed the songs in folders per day and got each song name right.
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.
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.
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.
foobar is the best https://www.foobar2000.org/mac
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.
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
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).
I liked it but realised I couldn't watch anything on VLC while this ran. Too bad.
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?
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.
Probably gaming metrics. “87% of users used my team's program this month!” Who cares if 87% of those did it unintentionally? That's some other team's problem.
Exactly this. The telemetry stats will bubble up to some level of management and it will show, "after making the play key launch the music app more people are using it". That's it. Explanations won't fit on the slide deck. In fact it probably isn't even that much, it would just be a graph with "line goes up" after the making play launch the music app.
No other key on my keyboard opens an application. I don't see why there should be one special key that operates that way.
The search key opens the Spotlight panel, and the speech key opens Dictation...
The triangle key opens a calculator and the square opens a terminal.
What do you mean not everyone has the same keyboard???
Macs generally come with the same keyboard, though.
My Mac didn't come with any keyboard at all, so I'm still using my keyboard that has Circle, Triangle, Square and Cross in the top-right for my Mac as well.
The insufferable part is not letting you disable it.
Dating Fireball just posted about how broken SwiftUI is for basic things AppKit was doing correctly in the late 90s (undo/redo)[0].
I think peak productivity for desktops was probably hit about 10 years ago. Most things since then are worse, and the best things from macOS (drag and drop everything nearly anywhere, consistent keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, scriptability of everything, etc.) were never copied by other systems.
Now systems are being designed to follow Node JS-style development which doesn’t work like a normal thing anywhere and native apps are just as bad as electron apps from a usability perspective…
At least they can be vibe coded since Interface Builder is no longer needed?
0 - https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/swiftui_only_makes_it_eas...
I think playing something when I hit the play button makes a lot of sense. (The headphones auto-play is a bit less obvious than the keyboard key, I would probably want that to do nothing in this case.)
The issue IMHO is that this is not configurable. Apple Music may even be a reasonable default (being the built-in music player). But it should provide options for Apple Music, whatever other apps I have installed, or nothing.
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!
A similar scourge is encroaching on Google-branded android phones, as they add mandatory apps to cover stuff like supporting earbuds you don't own.
Are you talking about the pixel buds app? They ask you on setup if you want it installed, and you can uninstall it anytime. Seems pretty far from "mandatory".
Yes, that's the example I had in mind.
> 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.
> 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. So yes, that "system app" is (as far as Google is concerned) absolutely "mandatory" on my phone.
Apps I can't uninstall on my Pixel 9 or 10 (I forget): Gemini, Google TV, My Pixel, Now Playing, Screenshots, Wallet, Weather, YT Music
Some of those might be system level stuff, but I don't know what the heck Google TV is, and I certainly am not signing up for whtever "YT Music" is. Probably some spotify subscription thing they will cancel like they did google play music and whatever came before that. But I can't uninstall any of these, or even delete the icons. They're just visual trash I can't hide from the launcher.
I don't trust the digital music stores anymore, cumulatively I have probably $100 worth of music I've bought across 3-4 music stores in the last 25 years and I can't access any of it anymore. Meanwhile my MP3 collection and WinAmp from high school continue to work without issue.
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.
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?
Because this OS developer is also trying to sell you their Music service subscription. I'm sure having this setting would hurt some of their internal KPIs and therefore would never be implemented.
I think they’re wrong for this, though I’d read a steelman of why not
There’s a strong argument for tight integration-the argument for NOT allowing customization is much weaker.
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.
YouTube does respond to it though?
sometimes you can have a youtube video that is paused, and you hit play/pause button thinking it will unpause it but for whatever reason that video seems to not be registering as being unpausable so OSX thinks there is nothing to unpause, so it opens itunes, it's one of the reasons apple was cited under geneva convention violations for unusual weaponry last year
Mainly want that button for pausing a video to play music or vice versa. Don’t love the logic (which will it play, or pause?) but maybe it’s about as good as it could be without more complexity like first press pauses background playback, second press begins foreground playback. (Could probably script that now that I say it, an easy Hammerspoon or something.)
> 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.
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.
> You can't uninstall Apple Music
Internet Explorer bundling was an instruction manual!
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.
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!
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.
There are multiple different sources that the user might want to start playing. Browser tab A/B/C (example: web radios), a music application or music service website in a tab that's not even opened yet (eg: spotify), the last video tab they opened (ex: youtube).
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.
> Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO
That's currently how it works.
This is purely an issue and complaint for when nothing at all was playing or open, and an app hasn't currently registered a handler.
If you land on a fresh desktop from reboot and press play, what should happen?
In my experience, this is a more frequent issue. At least 1 time per day, I hit play hoping to play Spotify in a browser tab or some radio tab and for some reason it opens Apple Music instead. Sometimes it could be an issue on my side, ex: the tab is dead or not even opened.
But whatever, the experience is bad: I have to wait for the Music application startup time, then click the context menu and select "Quit Apple Music". It feels like being forced to watch a product ad. Opening Apple Music is never what I want. Imagine if pressing shift opened TextEdit by default, that would be silly. Or doing CMD-v where you can't paste would automatically pop up some random app.
I feel like no machine response is a correct UX pattern in this case. The absence of sound playback would indicate to me that I need to do something else to play sound.
The best course of action would be to let the user specify their default music app to bind the keys to.
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
Let me change the default music player
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.
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.
Because the key press is ambiguous and probably unintentional if nothing is open. If the question is "play what?" then it shouldn't guess
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?
At least give the user the option.
I am utterly confused why pressing play would reasonably do anything other than playing something, or possibly pausing something.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple Music can not be uninstalled. That's pretty much "press ganged" in my book.
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.
your point would carry more weight were it possible to switch 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"
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.
Yes, so many times I've been jumpscared by work-related audio in my playlists because of this
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.
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.
I wonder if SwiftDefaultApps might yield different results compared to the Cmd+I menu? It's a crude-yet-still-working preference pane for setting default apps in System Settings, rather than using example files:
https://github.com/Lord-Kamina/SwiftDefaultApps
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
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
I only recently discovered that not only can you not uninstall Apple's bloatware - you can't even hide it in a folder!
I just can't understand why I have to have my list of useful apps interspersed with cruft like Books.app or Journal.app.
The (shitty) logic here is that you don’t ‘own’ the OS, but merely rent it, so “deal with it”
You can disable the control that prevents deleting the app (SIP).
SIP is only one part of this, you also would need to disable SSV.
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.
I'd say having to turn off System Integrity Protection as a prerequisite to uninstalling a music player is crazy. Spoken as someone who likes MacOS and Apple Music.
The Apple Music thing bothers me and adds friction to my life every single day that I use MacOS.
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.
^ How can you make such an obviously wrong statement?
Drag Music app to Trash, and that it! Like you do with any other app.
You can not do this on MacOS, at least on MacOS 26 on Apple Silicon without SIP disabled. I was:
- 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.
I hope this is a joke. You cannot delete it. It's considered "system" software.
That doesn't work on my machine. Maybe it worked back in the snow leopard days.
Now the app doesn't even have the "move to trash" item in the contextual menu like non-system apps do
^ How can you make such an obviously wrong statement
Go ahead and try. It's not like "any other app".
As a non power of Mac (only recently switched), I'll definitely try this.
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...
The Dock just contains a bunch of shortcuts. The app itself lives in the /Applications folder along with the rest of them that you can choose to add to your dock (by just dragging them down there and letting a spot open up for it).
Same! And there is no obvious close button etc on the overtop blocking modal dialog either. It’s a dark pattern.
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:
This was good info, thanks! Didn't think it'd be possible.
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.
Ah, yeah. I'm using noTunes.
I guess you mean it runs automatically at Mac user login, so that it is running all the time.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 encourage you to look into Little Snitch.
Whats the difference between LS and LuLu. I have an old LS license and after I switched to LuLu I didn’t miss anything.
Is there a consensus on what can be blocked in LuLu/LS without breaking any functionality?
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.
I use https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
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.
Installed, thanks!
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
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!
There was a website to remove it completely from your library, it launched in 2014 and was up for many years, but is now gone.
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.
Joey Ramone never wrote a song about U2.
+1 point for Joey Ramone.
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!
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
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.
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.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this is the default behavior for a supposedly premium operating system.
Because Apple's view seems to be that if you aren't using all of Apple's products, you're not their target audience.
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.
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.
1. Pressing play button plays music
"Absolutely unlimited grief and inconvenience!"
Pressing the stem on your AirPods, or pressing the play button, or pressing function enter on a Mac opens an undeletable application.
If you dont have music, this just wastes a bit of time. If you have music, apparently it wastes a lot of time.
Cherry or grape?
I would like to choose which music app opens when I hit play. I my case it is not the locked one.
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.
Maybe it's tired to you. The reason why it's a decade-old shtick is because Apple spent a decade adopting Microsoft-tier design patterns. They push advertisements in the OS and first-party apps, and then refuse to improve the experience with iterative updates. It is an ongoing issue.
> No option’s perfect.
Bullshit. I've used Linux and Windows PCs before, I have not heard a single user want Apple Music to open when they put on their headphones. There is a perfect solution, but you lack the willpower to call Apple out for dark patterns. This should only be an opt-in feature, full-stop.
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.
How do you figure a price of 0 is a high price?
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).
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.
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
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:
The MacMediaKeyForwarder works like a charm:
https://github.com/quentinlesceller/macmediakeyforwarder
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.
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.
Yeah but does your Mac have a key combo to launch LinkedIn? Windows +1, Mac 0
You close LinkedIn? ;-)
Is this real?!
yes hold down all the things on the bottom left of your keyboard on windows, then press "L". so that's ctrl+alt+shift+win+L
It's on F8 on my laptop... of course i only remember when i try to do something and end up with Apple Music.
I'd rather just use the launchctl method. Disabling the play button is fine by me since I control music from Spotify directly.
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
This is clever but I worry about running yet another background app just to fix Apple's dumb design choice.
I have a better one:
https://asahilinux.org/fedoraThis comment is almost at the quality of "install gentoo" but it lacks the panache and vintage that 4chan has.
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.
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.
http://projectftm.com/#UrG-0V2gGFxdB6JRAZ1dHg there we go
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 great! We need something similar for knowledgeconstructiond and several other overly insistent Apple software components.
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 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.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spotify-music-and-podcasts/id3...
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.
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.
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?
PSA: Its Unix.
edit: sorry about that. this used to work before the Music.app moved to /System/ApplicationsI wish it were that simple.
(Mac OS Tahoe 26.5)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..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection
https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
this is the OG app.
I really like your approach. Smart. Personally though, I like AM opening up when I hit the PLAY button on my keyboard.
I'm so happy to have fallen on this. Apple Music launching on my Mac when I put on my AirPods drives me crazy.
I still use itunes for music that I've purchased. But all the features now push you towards streaming and its exhausting.
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
I had been using the app noTunes for this.
launching apple music on play, seems very similar to microsoft's early anti trust case and internet explorer
I can't go into music app because it blocked b a school and its guilderland
Would also love to stop the dictionary app from opening
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.
The lack of applications like this is why macOS will always be a superior alternative to Linux.
/s for the sarcasm impaired
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.
Thank you. Thank you.
I'be been using a tool called NoTunes for years. https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes Fuck that app and fuck your subscription Apple.
Or delete the Music app… zero processes required.
How?
Thank You!
Ok. Now help me get spotlight to index my mirror-style Google Drive. Seems only this level of genius could accomplish it.
There is another app called notunes that I have been using for ages.
Yes. Yes. Thank you. I wanted something like for years.
brew install notunes
Another fix for this bollocks
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Or just switch to an Android phone.
I have an Android phone. It’s really not a replacement for a Macbook Pro though.
This software doesn't work on an Android phone.
Only with GraphenOS
Just uninstall it! Mac is simple if you know how to use it!
Clearly you do not.