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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

Finally! This is so annoying for Spotify users. Every time the system starts up, and Spotify is configured to start at startup, but you haven't interacted with the window yet, then press the physical play button on the keyboard—instead of starting playback as you'd expect, the system starts Apple Music. It drives me mad.

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> Finally! This is so annoying for Spotify users. Every time the system starts up, and Spotify is configured to start at startup, but you haven't interacted with the window yet, then press the physical play button on the keyboard—instead of starting playback as you'd expect, the system starts Apple Music. It drives me mad.

But you're in Apple's ecosystem, you're supposed to use Apple products, happily.

The obvious fix for that "bug" is to start using Apple Music.

And buy more hardware, just to be safe…

closing issue as [fixed in m4]

At least Windows had the decency to make their ridiculous straight-to-LinkedIn keyboard shortcut obscure. Applications auto-launching should not be a thing unless the user set them up to do so or they’re essential to the system’s functioning.

Mind blown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

Firstly, as someone who is frequently driven nuts by strawman arguments, thank you for spreading the general message!

In this particularly case though, I think you're missing the point. Apple takes an opinionated "we are right" approach to design, and it's typically an all-or-nothing thing. If Apple decides to allow choice, then you get choice. If they don't, then you don't. It's one whole, beautiful, integrated system (as they would say). There's a lot of (intentional) friction[1] in place to make keeping a toe in or out very uncomfortable.

[1]: Don't think this needs a citation, but if you disagree take a look at the "buy your mom an iphone" stories and the internal emails about making iMessage work on Android (Apple/Android families and all that)

Making iMessage work on Android is a non issue for most parts of the world: mobile messaging is fragmented and the US uses SMS/iMessage, while most of the rest of the world uses either whatsapp, LINE or WeChat.

I think you're missing the point. It's not about this single example. The point is that this is how Apple operates. It's embedded in product decisions all over the place.

But also, this comes off a bit like a "if you don't like it, move to another country" type of response. It's not very reasonable, and it's not very helpful for the majority of people.

> Apple takes an opinionated "we are right" approach to design, and it's typically an all-or-nothing thing. If Apple decides to allow choice, then you get choice. If they don't, then you don't.

How does this differ from any other company?

you have to follow up the claim that it's a strawman with a counterpoint, otherwise it doesn't count. you can't just say strawman and walk away, if you actually want curious conversation, which is what this site seeks

Also annoying if you use AirPods for Google Meet and Zoom. Half of the time when I put in my AirPods, here comes Apple Music, stealing focus from what I was trying to do.

I get this all the time with bluetooth audio and even Carplay— connect the phone to some external audio sink and boom, I'm listening to whatever is at the top of my music library sorted alphabetically (The Absentee, by Crooked Still).

I'm relived to hear that this isn't a problem which goes away if I buy Airpods.

I never used to have this problem until recently, when it started happening every time I’d start my car - and even every time I’d stop playing other media in my car.

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music. At least they let you do that.

iPhones are even worse. You play a sound in any app, like a short clip in instagram or Safari, and then press play again you get Apple Music.

This has been broken since the very first iPhone.

They just need to add a stack of 2 entries to fix this for 99% of usages.

at least on iOS you can permanently delete the music app (permanently meaning system updates won't restore it)

Wait, you can do that? Will that fix the play pause issue ? Thank you, this is wonderful. I never thought it was an Music app issue. I always it's just iOS pip being broken.

I had never experienced what the gp was experiencing and I can only guess it’s because I’ve had apple music uninstalled ever since they allowed that.

> ever since they allowed that

do you remember about when that was?

I want to say 5 years ago, my car is a 2018 and I know the U2 autoplay thing was an issue when I bought it, but I feel like within a year a new OS came out that allowed deleting default apps and that solved the U2 issue. And I guess saved me from experiencing the gp’s issue.

I actually want the app though. Some music is not on Spotify that I have from iTunes music store back in the day. If you can believe it, several Black Sabbath albums aren't on Spotify.

This phenomenon is what is causing me to seriously contemplate returning to my own music collection. It's getting crazy

Ditto. And my Spotify library shows cracks more and more. I am a playlist curator by heart, did that with my 100GB MP3/FLAC Music collection for 20 years before switching to Spotify, but now and then you get an empty artist/track name entry and can't even see what song it was, due to the Song rights being lost.

Same. I've come to highly detest the empty artist/track name. Sometimes it's easy to figure out (such as a "discography" or "greatest hits" playlist where one album or some major-hit single disappears), but more and more often it's been pieces of a playlist I loved that is more and more wiped out. One of my favorite playlists has almost 30% of the songs as empty D-:

Well.. to be fair, those records aren't on any system anymore. It's a lawyer problem.

I was all the way on iTunes for its entire existence until several years ago. I just can't take its continuous nonsensical UI changes.

Now I recommend Plex. I use Prism player on my iPhone and I download my whole library from my MBP host. It's perfect.

You can, but you may lose the ability to reliably play anything on your car over lightning. At least I do.

(I also have to have downloaded music... thankfully I got that U2 album ages ago, ha.)

Yes, I had that issue too (years ago, when they first allowed deleting the Music app). I think it might not be a problem in newer cars, but my car radio only had iPod support, not iPhone, and it seemingly needed at least one song in the music library for the connectivity to work at all.

I actually bought this 10 minute long silent song on iTunes at the time, so my phone wouldn’t automatically play Weezer’s “Across the Sea” every time I connected my phone to the car: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

I've never used anything other than bluetooth (in my ancient f150) so that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

That doesn’t help me as I use Apple Music to listen to music that isn’t on Spotify.

The play button defaulting to Apple Music even when another sound source has been used more recently is one of the few things I dislike about iPhones.

That’s odd, because that’s not the experience I have. I’ve just replicating the behaviour you see and I’m not getting it. Could you give an example?

This isn’t an Apple Music thing. It’s an app stealing audio focus and them requiring you to manually revert back to what you were listening to previously.

Also that iOS decides to default to Apple Music. Every time I connect my phone to my car for example it defaults to Apple Music. Even though I have used Spotify AND Overcast to play audio lately but almost never Apple Music.

At least I could still buy "A a a a a a very good song" in iTunes Music Store still so it won't alphabetically run Anno Mundi (or for my wife whatever is the lexiographically first track of that U2 record they pushed on everyone)

I modified my touch bar to no longer show the play/pause button because every time I forgot and hit it, I got punished by Apple Music opening and getting stuck in a loop of me force-quitting it and it restarting.

Me too. Sad to say just how huge the quality of life improvement from this small tweak.

I feel weird reading this thread because I use a Mac all day, every day, and I have never noticed this problem. I honestly had no idea that this was a big frustration for people, and when I saw this thread I thought "why would I need to prevent Apple Music from opening?"

I can't remember ever being annoyed by the "play" button opening Apple Music - the worst it might do is start playing the YouTube video in an open browser tab when I wanted it to play Spotify (it depends on which app i most recently alt-tabbed from), but that's only a minor annoyance.

Am I the weird one? My system rarely starts up because I rarely turn it off; why bother? (`uptime` reports that the last time I restarted the computer was 79 days ago.) And I pretty much always have Spotify or YouTube (the two main places I open in the background, so Macos doesn't need to open a new app to start playing.

What am I doing right?

For me, it's an issue because my headphones have touch input on the outside of the right side ear and often when I'm putting them on I'll accidentally rich it in a way that registers as a tap which sends the play command.

The launch of Apple music also sends your system serial number to Apple, so technically Macs all have a single hotkey to share their hardware identifier and IP with the mothership.

Technically Apple sent their serial number to you.

Either way you can prevent this by selecting "Don't Send" when you first set up your Mac

This is false. No matter what you do configuration-wise, macOS sends hardware identifiers to Apple, on each OS update (the ECID and others to the TSS server gs.apple.com), as well as when it registers for APNS. The obtained hardware-identifier-linked certs are then used continuously to access APNS.

There is no avoiding it in the first instance (the OS update process), as it is required for updates if you have boot security enabled, and there is no UI to disable APNS.

You were talking about the hotkey.

Good call. I agree generally with GP, but they definitely did shift the goal posts :-)

And it is actually very useful, at least if you buy AppleCare+

Global repair with capped low price just by giving your computer and no questions asked. I just personally saved about 3000 dollars.

Exactly this. Concierge needs to know who the hell you are.

I never agreed to the EULA, which at least makes it easy to stop.

Somewhat related: Any veteran Mac user know any way to disable this thing?

https://i.postimg.cc/P5XJ1wwJ/image.png

System Settings > Control Centre > Now Playing > Show When Active or Don’t Show in Menu Bar

If only it were so easy. What is shown in the screen shot above is the result of exercising the option you describe.

Unfortunately that option only disables the display of the currently playing track title, not the entire section labelled "Music".

BeardedSpice is the saviour.

He's doing the lords work here!

For newer Macs (10.15+) Beardie is a fork that’s been kept current.

https://github.com/Stillness-2/beardie

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