Interesting, there's always been a menu bar icon for it for me. You can hide it, though.

I guess you mean it runs automatically at Mac user login, so that it is running all the time.

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!)

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'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.

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.