This is a hard-fork of great noTunes by Tom Taylor. All credits for such great idea and for initial implementation go to him. The fork was made to cover my own purposes and probably could be useful for someone else: the major one is an automatic launch on user's login (through UI).

To avoid any possible clashes, the app was renamed to noTunez. The documentation below has been adjusted accordingly to the changes introduced. That's totally fine and fully encouraged if these changes are contributed back to the original app.

noTunez is a macOS application that will prevent iTunes or Apple Music from launching.

Simply launch the noTunez app and iTunes/Music will no longer be able to launch. For example, when bluetooth headphones reconnect.

You can toggle the apps functionality via the menu bar icon with a simple left click.

brew tap zkondor/dist
brew install --cask notunez

Right click the menu bar icon to toggle Launch at Login. That's all!

Left click the menu bar icon to toggle between its active states.

Enabled (prevents iTunes/Music from opening)

Disabled (allows iTunes/Music to open)

Right click the menu bar icon and click Hide Icon.

Quit noTunez, run the following command in Terminal and re-open the app:

defaults delete xyz.kondor.noTunez

To quit the app either:

With menu bar icon visible

Right click the menu bar icon and click quit.

With menu bar icon hidden

Quit the app via Activity Monitor or run the following command in Terminal:

osascript -e 'quit app "noTunez"'

To show on screen notification that a launch iTunes/Apple Music was handled (prevented to run):

defaults write xyz.kondor.noTunez notificationOnHandle.enabled 1

The notification is shown for 1 second. To increase the interval:

defaults write xyz.kondor.noTunez notificationOnHandle.showInterval 3

Replace YOUR_MUSIC_APP with the name of your music app in the following command.

defaults write xyz.kondor.noTunez replacement /Applications/YOUR_MUSIC_APP.app

Then /Applications/YOUR_MUSIC_APP.app will launch when iTunes/Music attempts to launch.

The following command will disable the replacement.

defaults delete xyz.kondor.noTunez replacement

The code is available under the MIT License.

• Original implementation (noTunes) (c) Tom Taylor
• Launch at Login library (c) Sindre Sorhus