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Last active September 13, 2016 17:40
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Detaching/reattaching Mac media keys to iTunes
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You've been there...

Maybe you're listening to your favourite song on Rdio, or maybe checking your Soundcloud stream. You reach for the play/pause key on your keyboard and BAM, motherfucking iTunes comes up. Don't you hate that? I do.

Luckily, there's a way to fix it. Open your terminal and type:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

Voilà, iTunes no longer responds to the media keys. The only downside is that now iTunes doesn't respond to the media keys at all. I couldn't care less, but if you're a crazy person who actually likes iTunes (poor you!), you can reattach the keys at any time with:

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

One could conceivably run the detach script at login and write a small AppleScript launcher to reattach the keys and then launch iTunes. I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader.

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