The last couple of days, I’ll be sitting here working at my computer - or worse, be on the phone - and Music will launch. I can’t figure out a trigger for it. And more bizarrely, I close it out, and it immediately launches again. I had that “close/re-launch” thing happen half a dozen times in a row yesterday.
Quite honestly, I never use Music on my Mac. I could almost certainly just delete it and not miss it. And the one of two times i actually need to go in there for something, I could reinstall/uninstall if necessary.
But…
Is there a way to NOT have Music launch automatically, ever, under any circumstances?
Anyways, perhaps you can discern a clue in there somewhere to help solve your issue. I, and I’m guessing you as well, did not see anything in Music > Settings which would help with this.
Using the old shiny, the boring old internet search, I found these links (which you may have already found as well), and which may or may not be useful (some duplication, and it seems this is not a new issue):
except that the syntax is no longer valid (it has to be “bootout” instead of “unload”, and it keeps asking me about a domain. But I looked in launchctl list, and that service doesn’t even seem to be running. A grep of the list doesn’t show the rcd or anything with the word “music”. So I logically couldn’t unload it, even if I could get the syntax correct.
And I already tried / ruled out all the other suggestions in those articles. So no joy thus far.
Mechanical keyboard with custom-mapped keys, so I really doubt that’s happening - but I can double-check my layouts. I don’t even think I have a media key mapped.
That said, I wouldn’t mind disabling the media key functionality entirely if it were possible. Especially Music auto-playing.
Do you have a second keyboard — bluetooth, most likely — linked to this Mac? I had something similar happen to me ages ago, and it was because I had been testing a different keyboard. It had been pushed to the back of my desk and something was occasionally and gently hitting the media key to start music.
This can also happen with a mouse that has additional buttons.
I had this exact same scenario occur, except that the random “something occasionally and gently hitting the media key” was replaced by a cat who would walk and then sleep on the Bluetooth keyboard. As a writer of fiction, I frequently left a word processor doc open, for a while I thought I might be receiving messages of some sort from a muse of some sort. It was disturbing since amidst the gibberish, some of the phrases were alarmingly meaningful and well-written.
When I realized it was the cat, I ensured she no longer had access to a keyboard so she could not hone her writing skills further, else she might have begun producing work of greater value than mine. Now, with the advent of MLM/AI, perhaps I should have let her continue. I could have marketed her efforts as “Cat GPT.”
