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.

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.

Myyy codex with my skills would never! Never do such a thing.

You can turn off the cloud service in Apple Music and still use it with your local tracks and music downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (which still exists).

I did this for most of last year. I had all local music in Apple Music, disabled the cloud stuff, and synced it all to my iPhone by plugging it in with a cable, as if it was an old iPod. It all still worked.

The Music app reads the same library and has the same core music-oriented functions as iTunes. Is the interface what you're missing?

There's great hand crafted library managers/players out there like https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org 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.

Why vibe code anything? VLC would fit the bill. Even quicktime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

vibe code your own, implement some kind of yt-downloader? torrent downloader,etc, maybe some album art. hm might make one myself.

The specification would matter more than the source it produces. Specify it right and share it with the world. Code is basically a winamp skin on the OS level.

iTunes 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.

But why wouldn't pressing the Play button, when no media session is available, not open the music player?

> 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.

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.

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!

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.

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, so many times I've been jumpscared by work-related audio in my playlists because of this

Yeah, this sucks

> 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?

Same! And there is no obvious close button etc on the overtop blocking modal dialog either. It’s a dark pattern.

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.

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.

Joey Ramone never wrote a song about U2.

+1 point for Joey Ramone.

Oh man, throwback to when they forced the U2 albums on to everyone’s device for ReasonsTM

I encourage you to look into Little Snitch.

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:

  killall 'Music Decoy'

This comment is almost at the quality of "install gentoo" but it lacks the panache and vintage that 4chan has.

I actually had to look at my keyboard as I'd forgotten there even was a play button.

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.

It seems I need to leave this running for it to work? So it's not just a configuration changes.

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 wish it were that simple.

    ~: 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

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..

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.

The OS isn't supposed to be premium since it's free, does that help figure it out?

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.

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.

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.

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