Stop the Apple Music app from launching

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

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

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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

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

[1] https://chromatix.app/

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.

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

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

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

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

Similar situation in the past: Microsoft vs Netscape.

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!

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

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

+1 point for Joey Ramone.

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

FTA:

Uh.. how do I quit this app?

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

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

Run the following command in the Terminal:

  killall 'Music Decoy'

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.

    ~: 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

The rest of us ask for a customizable experience.

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.

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.