Disabling I-Tunes?

[Jim Cassedy]

I hate I-tunes. Don't ask why, cuz I won't tell you. I just hate it with a passion I usually reserve
for film platters, child molesters and tax collectors. So, that being said, my question is:
> IS THERE ANY WAY TO PERMANENTLY NUKE I-TUNES so that it NEVER starts
on any of my MAC-puters. I think I tried removing it on one machine once, but totally
removing it had unintended consequences that caused issues with a couple of other
programs. So maybe I don't want to totally remove it- - I just want it to never, ever,
ever, ever start up automatically again as long as I live. (Or is that not possible?)

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I hate Apple period!

[Frank Cox]

I know nothing about modern Apple computers at all, never used one that's newer than an Apple II. (And the C64 ran rings around that in every way other than speed of disk access.)

Having said that, I'm under the impression that itunes does more than just music. Aren't some of the programs that you might actually use tied into it in some way as well?

If so, shooting it down might kill something that you really wanted.

[Frank Angel]

What Mark said....to the tenth power.

And Jim -- I have no problem at all telling you WHY I HATE iTunes and the evil empire that spawned it: My brother asked if I could transfer the music he had on his iPhone to an iPod device that he had. Sure, sez I; I am thinking piece of cake, right?. Au contraire mon fraire. So I go about finding the right cables with the right CONNECTORS to hook the two devices together. Then after a half hour going thru a junk draw full of computer cables and adapters, I find what I needed to make the interconnection and then tried to copy the MP3 files from his iPhone with the files to the player device that didn't. What happened next made me want to put both devices in the cement mixer my brother had outside in the yard. I got a message saying that I was trying to make and unauthorized copy. It asked me if I wanted to continue. Knowing that my brother had PAID a buck for each of the tunes on his phone, I responded, "Yes, continue... and Fuck You," And then the iPhone promptly ERASED all the files, leaving me (and me bro) with NOTHING on EITHER device. Before my head exploded, my brother told me that he remembered at one time he had asked my nephew to put the music (normal MP3 files) on his PC, so luckily all but a few tunes were saved. So the next step before I turned on the cement mixer, was to copy the files from the PC to both those iScrewYou devices. But I was having NO success with that either as the iPhone wouldn't even see the PC. After lots more cursing, I googled to find out why this was so difficult. And there it was -- it said in order to transfer music files to an Apple device, I needed to install that piece-o-shit iTunes software on the PC first. WTF? No way was this lad going to contaminate my brother's PC/Win 7 with damn iTunes, as I totally feared that no doubt it would erase every MP3 file on the PC claiming that I was trying to make Un-effin-authroiszed copies.

How is it even remotely possible that it won't allow a simple file transfer unless it is done thru iTunes? I got my nephew on the phone to see if he knew what was what and he heard the growling and seething in my voice and the grinding of my teeth and told me to leave it alone and "calm down...remember your heart, uncle Frank" and that he would try to resolve it next time he was over at the house .

[Randy Stankey]

You are probably using a version of MacOS prior to 10.15. As of OSX 10.15, iTunes is defunct. You can still use it if you have an older OS.

You don't need to delete iTunes because it does other stuff like manage your iPod or transfer items to your iPhone. It also manages backups for your iPhone/iPad/iPod so that, if you ever have a crash, you can recover.

Still iTunes is a PITA. It started out great but quickly became bloatware. Since when does a music player back up your iPhone? Sense does make not that!

Instead, make some other application be your default to open the kinds of files you want to play. (i.e. You can tell the OS to use some other app to open a (music) file when you double-click it.

Instructions.png

I suppose you could use a terminal command to make some other app be your default music player but I'd have to look that up.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The best solution = Spotify!!

[Mark Ogden]

Since when does a music player back up your iPhone? Sense does make not that!

Talk like Yoda, you must not . Anyway, I'm not sure what OS you are running, but on a Mac this hasn't been true in a while, I think since OSCatalina. iPhones back up thru Finder now, and syncs to a separate folder. Music doesn't get involved. On a PC, who the hell knows what kind of voodoo shit happens.

I'm not sure what the issue is here in the first place. Is Apple Music (iTunes, archaically) starting automatically from your phone, like through CarPlay? Or is it from another device? The only way for that to happen is if you have Autoplay switched on. There are steps to reverse this that can be Googled/Binged/Dogpiled/DuckDuckGo-ed, and there is a very robust Apple on-line support community as well. Try this:


https://www.macworld.com/article/179...0deselect%20it.

[Randy Stankey]

Since he was talking about iTunes, I assumed that he's running a pre-Catalina version of OS X. I'm not certain whether iTunes will even run on Catalina. As you say, Apple Music, et. al. have taken over functionality for iTunes. Therefore, I gave a pre-Catalina solution.

OS X 10.15 is code named "Catalina." Any OS on or after 10.15 would handle music the new way. Any OS 10.14 and earlier (pre-Catalina) would handle music the old way.

Sure, you can delete iTunes but, as I said, iTunes has become little more than a big, bloated mess. There are some functions, handled by iTunes, that you might still want. Deleting iTunes could make it more difficult to do those things in the future. The better solution would be to change the default app for all your music files. The easiest way to do that is via the "Get Info..." dialogue like I explained.

You could change your default music player directly through the OS and the quickest way to do that would be using the UNIX terminal. However, I forget the terminal command(s) that would make that change. You might also need to change your MIME-type associations in your web browser because, if you don't, the browser might automatically fire up iTunes by default. Maybe...maybe not. It depends on the browser you use. A "good" browser would ask the OS what to do but not all browsers are so well behaved. (e.g. If you use Safari, I would expect good behavior but, if you use Chrome or Firefox, I'm not sure how other apps behave.)

BTW: Don't bitch at Apple about DRM on your music files! It wasn't Apple's decision! The reason for all that DRM refusing to open your music files and crap like that comes from the record labels. When Apple tried to start up the iTunes Music Store, none of the record companies would allow their content to be included in iTunes if Apple didn't include DRM. If not for that, the Music Store probably wouldn't exist and this whole conversation would have been rendered moot.

It's easy to scrub the DRM off most music files, anyhow. Just make a playlist of all the DRM-ed music you want to scrub then burn it to a CD and re-import it. If you don't want to waste the CDs or if you don't have a burner, tell iTunes to burn to a disk image (.dmg file) instead. There are other ways to do it but this is the quick and dirty way that doesn't require any other software.

So I go about finding the right cables with the right CONNECTORS to hook the two devices together.

Those "Thunderbolt" cables can carry two channels 10 Gbit of data (for a total of 20 Gbit/sec.) plus up to 10 watts of power all in a cable that is thinner than a pencil. They can daisy chain up to six devices and have to capacity to transfer full-motion (2K) video, bi-directionally. They can also carry PCI-e and DisplayPort. Cables can be plugged in any orientation or swapped end for end.

Thunderbolt was developed in cooperation with Intel, BTW. Intel's version is/was called "LightPeak."

The reason for all the confusion about different connectors is because of the EU's decision to require all portable devices to use the same style. (USB-3) Apple would have gone with all Thunderbolt cables if they had their choice.

[Mike Blakesley]

I hate iTunes, too. I liked it at first, because it allowed me to load up my own music edits and my own "compilation" CDs, which have things like segues and such that aren't on the original albums. I have an iPod that I use in my vehicle to play my collection.

A few years ago, iTunes decided to stop syncing with the iPod. I found ways to force it to happen by manually copying files over, but eventually it got to where it wouldn't even recognize the iPod when I plugged it in.

It so happened that I got a new computer around that time. Perfect, I thought -- I'll start fresh with the music library and the iTunes software and all, and everything will be rosy. Plugged in the iPod, and it recognized it immediately... but then still refused to update. Or it would say it was updated but then it really wasn't. The worst of all was, when I restored my backup, it lost a bunch of my home-made files, so I had to reload those.

Then it started giving me trouble in the vehicle. It will play just fine and then out of the blue, it just stops dead. Unplug, replug, and it will work....except sometimes it doesn't, and you have to reboot the iPod. Sometimes it starts playing with a bunch of semi-musical static, with the only way out being the unplug/replug routine. Its latest trick is it will appear to be playing, the timer is counting and all, but no sound is coming out.

I've pretty much given up on the iPod and now I use my phone (Apple, natch) to stream Amazon Music Unlimited, where I've created a bunch of great playlists, some of which mirror the compilations I've made. Cell service around here is spotty, so I've downloaded a bunch of stuff to my phone so I'll always have music. But even that doesn't always work -- sometimes the Bluetooth connection crashes, or sometimes it just spits out that vague "something went wrong, please try again" message without telling you what's going on. I miss the CD days when you could just leave the disk in your player and it would pick up where you left off every time you get in the vehicle. The phone does that too, maybe one out of ten times. So now, in a world where I've got all the music in the world "at my fingertips," I've given up having music on short drives, it's not worth fiddling with the phone to make it work.

It's gotten to the point where these "always dependable" Apple products, those things where "you plug it in and it just works," are slightly less reliable than 8-track tapes were. Never thought I would make THAT comparison but here we are.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The best solution = Spotify!!

The problem with those services is that you never own any music yourself. Just recently I ended up with a playlist with holes in it, because the licenses had expired to those albums. Welcome to the world where you're not allowed to own anything anymore. This thing called capitalism is turning into the biggest joke ever, where you own nothing, but a happy few own everything... sounds a heck of a lot like communism to me.

Since he was talking about iTunes, I assumed that he's running a pre-Catalina version of OS X. I'm not certain whether iTunes will even run on Catalina. As you say, Apple Music, et. al. have taken over functionality for iTunes. Therefore, I gave a pre-Catalina solution.

The latest version for Mac is 12.8.2 and can still be downloaded from the Apple site and should even work for Apple Silicon using Rosetta 2. I'm not sure why you'd want to revert back to iTunes though, besides maybe supporting some old iPod or iPhone or some strange nostalgia...

[Randy Stankey]

My iPod uses a FireWire port to connect to the computer. I have it set up to mount as an external hard drive when it is plugged in. I just blast all my music into my it via the Finder as if I'm transferring to an external disk.

I don't really use the iPod very much, anymore...or much of anything that requires earphones to listen to. I've got, pretty much, permanent tinnitus 24/7 and my last hearing test showed that I'm starting to lose sensitivity in my left ear. Too much gunfire in the days when "real men" didn't wear earplugs.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

This all sounds familiar....... http://ww.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/fi...estions-needed

iTunes has been a train wreck for at least the last decade. I have it on my current laptop (not a MAC, I hate EVERYTHING APPLE) and it so far doesn't seem to bother other programs, but, as Randy posted above, to keep it out of the way you MUST make sure iTunes is NOT the default app to open anything OTHER than an iPod. It is vitally important that you check into ALL video files and audio files to make sure iTunes is NOT the default before you uninstall iTunes. I have done that in the past and it is a pain to reset everything if the defaults aren't cleared first.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The problem with those services is that you never own any music yourself. Just recently I ended up with a playlist with holes in it, because the licenses had expired to those albums. Welcome to the world where you're not allowed to own anything anymore. This thing called capitalism is turning into the biggest joke ever, where you own nothing, but a happy few own everything... sounds a heck of a lot like communism to me.



The latest version for Mac is 12.8.2 and can still be downloaded from the Apple site and should even work for Apple Silicon using Rosetta 2. I'm not sure why you'd want to revert back to iTunes though, besides maybe supporting some old iPod or iPhone or some strange nostalgia...

That's true of Spotify, but it's an inexpensive although high quality service. Spotify is also very good at always having the same stuff available. I can also run it through my stereo system and use the phone as the remote control.
If I hear some music that I absolutely want to have, and the library system here doesn't have it, I buy the CD cheaply on EBay. Then I rip it to my media storage NAS using JRiver Media Center. Playback is much the same, except the SPDIF signal from the Mother board feeds a DAC that I built. The DAC has no analog output stage and instead uses a pair of Lundahl line transformers that have a 60kHz top end. No complaints here!