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How to stop iTunes from launching when using Keyboard media keys

Hi,

I love the media keys on my MacBook and Apple wireless keyboard for playing, pausing, changing tracks etc with iTunes, but there are other than can utilize the media keys, like Spotify for instance. However, if I have iTunes closed, when I hit the Play key, iTunes will automatically launch, and will intercept any subsequent presses of just the play/pause button. Is there a way to stop this annoying behavior? I haven't found anything in the Keyboard shortcut system pref.

thanks.

black MacBook (Santa Rosa), 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 160GB HD, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 16GB iPod Touch, 2G 1GB iPod Shuffle, 4G 20GB iPod

Posted on Aug 20, 2009 5:51 PM

310 replies

Mar 4, 2015 1:33 PM in response to William Brawley

I did not get the rcd file chrisclock supplied to work on Yosemite10.10.2

I managed to patch the 10.10.2 rcd to not launch iTunes. Enjoy!

(Of course no guarantee that this works, use at your own risk!)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/miqur8lq85l8ok4/rcd_noitunes.zip?dl=0

unzip rcd_noitunes.zip

sudo cp /System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app/Contents/MacOS/rcd ~/rcd_backup

sudo mv rcd_noitunes/rcd /System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app/Contents/MacOS/rcd

Otherwise if you want to do it yourself then replace the 'tell application id “com.apple.iTunes” to launch' string with zeroes and run 'sudo codesign -s - -f rcd' to fix the signature (as chrisclock previously posted). This works fine on 10.10.2 too.

Next thing would be someone to modify the string so we can launch something else instead of itunes 🙂

gianwoo

Level 1

0 points

Jun 25, 2015 4:24 PM in response to chrisclock

Process worked for me. However, I am not a fan of installing untrusted code so I simply backed up rcd (in case I broke it), used hexedit to edit the rcd binary and change that string to 00's, saved, kicked the running rcd daemon (kill -HUP), re-signed and am working flawlessly.

Running OSX 10.10.3

Thanks!