It appears, after a lot of troubleshooting, and contacting Apple support, that I’m having a problem with Keyboard Maestro causing itunes to open automatically without my wanting it to open. I’ve searched through the macros for “itunes” but I can’t find anything there. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this may be happening? The problem doesn’t happen when KM isn’t running. But as soon as I open it, I can expect to see the problem show up unexpectedly at any time.
As I said, I’ve tried eliminating all other third party apps and KM is the only one that “seems to be” affecting this issue. So, any ideas are welcome.
As soon as it happens again again, do the following:
Open the KM Editor.
Select “All Macros”
Use the menu item "View->Sort macros by->Date used.
This should show the most recently run macros. Then look in them for any suspicious actions. Particularly “Play” or “Pause” actions, or something that types a keystroke which may be a shortcut to iTunes somehow.
Well, dang, that’s what I posted before Peter, or whoever it was, talked about the All Macros method, and I thought the All Macros method was cooler, and there you go saying it isn’t. Can’t win for losing.
Thanks for the various suggestions, though really just one - just different implementations. I will certainly give it a go when this think rears it’s ugly head again. Thanks!
Well, here it goes again. I selected all the macros and sorted by date used. It would be helpful, however, if there were a way that I could see the date of when the macro was last used. And, perhaps there is and I’m just missing it. But, nevertheless, the very first item is “Activate Application Switcher” and the one after it is “Launch Safari.” But Safari is already open and I haven’t typed anything. I was actually watching a movie on NetFlix and my hands were NOT on the computer, when all of a sudden, itunes opens. I can’t see anything in the first several macros that would give me a clue as to why this would happen.
Wow! However, should be a “broad_smile.” Thank you
I appreciate the help of that macro, because it showed indeed that the application switcher was activated today, whereas the next in line was activated two days previously. So, I guess I can rightly conclude that the KM macro Application Switcher is the culprit. However, I activated the application switcher several times but itunes failed to show up uninvited. So, I’m still in the dark. But, maybe this just tells me that KM is NOT the problem as previously suspected. It was just odd that itunes showed up pretty quickly after turning on KM. And then stopping itunes completely from it’s “on again and again and again” course after turning KM off.
Well, I’ll keep trying to figure it out. In one way, I’m delighted because I really like using KM!
You can select a macro and open the Window ➤ Macro Inspector and it will show you the last time it was triggered.
You can also look in the Engine.log file to see when macros were triggered.
Look at your Application Switcher macro and verify it has not had any changes made to it (eg, you could have accidentally added another action to it).
There are other things that could cause iTunes to launch - for example if you have any iTunes AppleScripts, they editing them could potentially cause iTunes to launch to read the dictionary.
Yeah, I learned a while ago to be careful when hitting Cmd+Q to exit the KM Editor. Depending on what's focused at the time, it's easy to accidentally change a "Type a keystroke" action to Cmd+Q, and that usually leads to head-scratching situations.
One of the most useless things that causes iTunes to launch is when a Bluetooth audio device switches between audio codecs, e.g., between aptX and SCO, which may happen when a VoIP app launches.
Thanks to everyone for suggestions to my problem. (I turned off Bluetooth a few weeks back but that hasn’t helped). Last night I just started closing every app and removed everything in my user login items and then restarted. Running without any of my third party stuff that I normally use, the problem still existed. I’ve come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with KM (which I’m glad to say). But, Apple support hasn’t been much help and the only relief I can get is to just turn the volume (within itunes) to 0 and minimize the itunes window when it shows up. It’s still running but at least I can listen to something else and work in other windows without being interrupted and I’ve gotten all my nice little third party apps back again. Sorry to have implied anything against KM, it just seemed to be the culprit but I don’t believe that anymore.
Could it be some sort of extraneous keystroke? For example, do you have any peripherals attached - keyboards, track pads, etc. - that are, I don’t know, unusual? That might cause this?
For that matter, is it possible you have something wrong with your keyboard, where it periodically sends whatever keystroke it is that can start iTunes? Like an intermittent short or something?
Also, perhaps there’s some way to disable starting iTunes from keys in general? If so, that might help narrow down the problem.
It is indeed VERY weird! I’m using a MacBook Pro, nothing attached anywhere except earphones. And, it can just begin when I’m not even touching the laptop (like when I’m watching Netflix). The laptop is less than a year old. I looked at /var/log/system.log and I found some lines right about the time that the “weirdness” began to happen last night. But, I don’t really know what it means. The log showed:
Jul 6 23:56:01 Arts-MacBook-Pro iTunes[1118]: ApplePushService: APSConnection being used without a delegate queue
Jul 6 23:56:14 Arts-MacBook-Pro iTunes[1119]: ApplePushService: APSConnection being used without a delegate queue
