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#music#apple#app#play#mac#itunes#button#don#still#player
Discussion (266 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can technically still buy albums, but you can really tell its only there because it was forgotten about.
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 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.)
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’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.
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.
Easy as [mpg]123
iTunes Match still exists, one of the handful of subs I pay for.
[1] https://chromatix.app/
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.)
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.
Stuff designed to rip mp3 streams got this right.
I'm probably holding it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Internet Explorer bundling was an instruction manual!
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.
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!
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.
You have to do it once per file type but it's once and done.
>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.
https://github.com/Lord-Kamina/SwiftDefaultApps
I'm by no way an Apple fan, but why not uninstall the app if you don't need it?
I just can't understand why I have to have my list of useful apps interspersed with cruft like Books.app or Journal.app.
Drag Music app to Trash, and that it! Like you do with any other app.
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:
> 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
+1 point for Joey Ramone.
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!
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.
So annoying and not great UX from Apple imo. Thanks for this.
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.
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:
- 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
If I were on my computer, it'd actually link the Gentoo script that we used to bootstrap it on AWS.
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.
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 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 the podcast app and so many times I would click an AirPod to resume and it would play a random song
Source code for this one: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy
- 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!)
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.
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.
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.
Slightly concerned Apple would patch this by preventing others from using the same bundle identifier as their official apps, though?
this is the OG app.
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
The rest of us ask for a customizable experience.
"Absolutely unlimited grief and inconvenience!"
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?
> 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.
/s for the sarcasm impaired
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.
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.
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.
Another fix for this bollocks