So, way back in 2009, I bought myself a Macbook Pro, mainly because I liked the all-metal case and backlit keyboard. (Seriously, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a Windows laptop with a backlit keyboard — go on, try it. It was even harder in 2009.) Now, as you probably are aware, Apple loves iTunes, their music management application. I, however, do not love iTunes, and much prefer crazy-customizable music-playing apps on Windows, like Foobar2000 and Winamp. I tried installing Cog, the closest thing I could find to Foobar2000. Now, I’m also a huge fan of the media keys (play/pause, next/prev track) on the keyboard, and so compatibility with those is a must. While Cog was indeed compatiable with the media keys, I found that Apple had implemented a convenient “feature” in Mac OS 10.6 and newer– if you press play/pause when iTunes is not running, iTunes will start itself and start playing. Needless to say, if you’re trying to use any other music player, including Spotify and VLC, this can be very irritating.
Luckily, someone managed to fix the issue!
- Download the fix from here – read the original forum post here [credit to this guy for finding it!]
- Open the DMG file
- Inside, run “MMFix” (I’ve tested it on Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) and Lion (Mac OS 10.7), and it works correctly on both.)
- …and enjoy pressing the play/pause button on your keyboard without iTunes ruining your day!
Works like a charm for me in Lion – was driving me nuts!!!
Now how to stream VLC over my iPad!!
s_
This works well, the only issue is it seems to disable smaller increment changes in both volume and display backlight (when you press shift-option-volume etc) undoing the patch using the app doesn’t seem to fix this.
@ergohack
Actually, the shift-option incremental changes were disabled in Lion by Apple themselves for no particular reason (oh the joys of Apple). See: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3197651?tstart=0
It’s too bad, since they were useful…