Disable Music app on macos when multimedia keys are pressed

Background

On macos Ventura (13.4) and many other versions of macos, the F8 key serves both as the function key or multimedia key “Play/Pause”.

Pressing this key by default should start or pause currently playing multimedia.

Unfortunately very often pressing this file results in actually starting default “Music” application (in previous versions it was iTunes). This shouldn’t happen when you have other active players that would capture the event, but it does.

This is very annoying to many users and there seem to be very limited options on how one can remove this app from their systems.

I use “Strawberry” music player which somehow doesn’t register(*) in the system as a handler of multimedia key presses correctly, so any time I try to play/pause music via multimedia keys it opens “Music” app.

Strawberry actually registers correctly but instead of ‘swallowing’ the event it looks like in addtion to Strawberry, other apps can handle it as well.

Solution

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

Run this script to disable multimedia keys system-wide.

This solves my issue because multimedia key presses still work for Strawberry.