Music Decoy

Music Decoy Stop launching the Music app whenever you press ▶ Play

What does this do?

Nothing. The app does absolutely nothing while running. 0% CPU all day long.

But by simply having it running, the macOS system won't launch the Music app whenever you accidentally press Play.

It won't launch Music even if you try to launch it manually! that might not actually be a good thing, but.. oh well

How does it achieve that?

By having the same bundle identifier as the system Music app: com.apple.Music

In more technical terms, this is what I found out about how the ▷ Play mechanism works:

• The Play event is caught by the rcd daemon (living at /System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app/Contents/MacOS/rcd)
• The daemon checks if there is any app playing something and forwards the event to that app
• If there is no such app, rcd checks if any running app has com.apple.Music as its bundle identifier
• Without a running com.apple.Music app, rcd launches the system Music app
• But if there is such an app, the event is forwarded to it instead

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'

Frequently asked questions?

I think they were only asked once, and they might not even be questions but I might as well record the info for posterity.

VLC crashes

Looks like VLC tries to use ScriptingBridge (opens in a new tab) to send commands to the Music app.

You can fix this by configuring the following setting:

How do I launch Music?

You can use this macOS Shortcut: Music.shortcut (opens in a new tab)

It will quit Music Decoy and launch the Music app, with a small delay between the two actions.

You can add it to your Dock for easy access: