How to stop Apple Music from opening automatically on MacOS
The problem
I have never used the Apple Music app. I do, however, use Bluetooth headphones to listen to music on both my phone and my laptop.
When I press play on the headphones, the Apple Music application opens on the computer, even if I have other things running on either machine that I would like to take precedence. Hello, no one was talking to you? Why are you here all of a sudden?
It’s obviously not that serious of an issue, but I am very petty, and also I like to understand exactly what I’m doing when I turn off System Integrity Protection and run sudo commands. So I spent a few hours trying to fix this and understand how things were working and FINALLY got it turned off, so if even one other person can read this and avoid that headache themselves then this post will have done its job.
OS: macOS Catalina 10.15.7 / App: Apple Music 1.0.6.10
WARNING: As far as I can tell, this does not work on macOS Big Sur. Hopefully I or someone else will find a way to fix it and post an update.
Step 1 — Disable SIP
- Restart computer
- When the Apple logo appears on the black screen, hold down ⌘ + R until it boots up into the recovery mode
- In the top menu, click Utilities > Terminal
$ csrutil disable
- In the top menu, click > Restart
Step 2 — Remount system partition in read/write
- Let your system reboot as normal
- When you’re back on your desktop, open your Disk Utility (you can find it in Spotlight)
- Disk Utility > Info (top right corner) > find your BSD device node (most likely ‘disk1s5’ or something similar)
- Open terminal
$ sudo mount -t apfs -wu /dev/<YOUR BSD DEVICE NODE>/Volumes
$ sudo mount -wu /; killall Finder
- At this point you shouldn’t have seen any rejection of those commands from your terminal, but also no major visible changes in your system.
Step 3 — Change the name of the app
- It sounds crazy, but really all this work was just to be able to change the actual name of the Apple Music application. Even with all that, you still will not be able to change the name of the app through the Finder’s interface. You’ll need to go through with sudo.
- Still in terminal, move up the directories until you’re in ‘/’ (two levels above ‘~’)
~$ cd ../.. /System/Applications
$ sudo mv Music.app <NEW NAME>.app
- At this point, if you receive the errors ‘Permission denied’, or ‘Operation not permitted’, it means you’ve messed up at some point in the earlier steps. If the new name does go through successfully, give your headphones a test. They should now work normally without opening Apple Music!
Step 4 —Very important! Re-enable SIP
- To finish up, restart your machine again
- When the Apple logo appears on the black screen, hold down ⌘ + R until it boots up into the recovery mode
- In the top menu, click Utilities > Terminal
$ csrutil enable
- In the top menu, click > Restart
All done!
For anyone who is curious/cautious, here are more details about the various commands and the process:
sudo : short for ‘substitute user do’ — allows user to act with admin privileges
mount : mount the following filesystem (makes it recognisable/readable to the computer)
-t : short for type (tells mount what type of file system to report on)
apfs : short for Apple File System
-wu : mount the following system as read/write (by default the apfs is set up as read-only)
/dev/disk1s5/Volumes : the main partition used for Finder
BSD Device Node: the device/disk identifier (for more detail run ‘diskutil list’ in the terminal)
/; : refers to the root system of macOS
killall Finder: force the Finder to quit (not as scary as it sounds)
csrutil enable/disable: the commands for System Integrity Protection, which is basically a set of barriers that macOS uses to keep the average user from accidentally messing up something critical in the root system of the machine. In my opinion it’s always better to keep this on, but safe to disable briefly to do a specific task that you’re confident in.
