As of El Capitan, the OS has introduced the new System Integrity Protection, which means you have to disable this to patch. I don't expect most folks are going to do this. But it does work.

This is a patch for removing the default OS X behavior of always starting iTunes when the play button on the keyboard is pressed. This feature can be useful for a lot of users, but it can also be annoying if iTunes isn't your "go to" application.

The Patch script will patch the Remote Control Daemon to replace the starting of iTunes whenever you press the play button to starting Spotify on the keyboard or an external remote control. This will only prevent iTunes from starting, all other functions (like play/pause while iTunes is running) will continue to work as before.

This program will backup the original file in case if you would like to restore the original functionality.

Lastly, with major upgrades of the Operating System, you may just have to run this again. Just make sure to delete the backup of the original before starting.

This is a fork from a project from Farhan Ahmad, which disabled the play button until an application had started up.

To run the patch (which does the backup automatically), clone this repository, navigate to the top level, and execute the the file Patch.command, as such: sudo ./Patch.command. It will prompt you for the rest.

Want to customize this to work on some other application? Just modify the string_to_use variable in edit_rcd_bin.py. Just make sure that it's exactly 48 characters in the string, otherwise you'll mess up the register math! But don't worry, if you do mess it up, just run the command again to undo it :)