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Comment by holdupagain

16 hours ago

We have evolved to iPhone dark pattern updating to suddenly starting Apple Music in my car bulldozing Spotify and me almost getting in a fucking car accident every time.

My car plays "Africa" by toto every time I plug in the iphone to charge. It was a trifling inconvenience, then over years it became rage inducing, and now it's reached all the way back around to funny.

  • It's not the phone deciding to do it, when the device connects the car is telling it to play. Check your infotainment settings to see if there's a way to turn it off.

    Apple doesn't have an official way to prevent it, but I think you could do it with Shortcuts and an automation to pause music triggered by "When CarPlay is connected."

    If it's tricky to get it to trigger at the exact time it starts playing, you could even do like:

      - Store media volume to a variable
      - Set media volume to 0
      - Wait 3 seconds
      - Stop playing
      - Restore original media volume

    • Yep. My old Honda Fit did this way before CarPlay. I believe it’s a holdover from external mp3 devices using track numbers in their filenames.

      It was always a stupid decision to start playing your music alphabetically, but it became a more stupid decision when music libraries were no longer carefully curated folders in the filesystem.

      1 reply →

  • If I had to pick one tune to listen to every day, that wouldn’t be the worst one.

    • If there's anything I've learned from using my favorite tracks as a daily alarm: there is no music that I won't eventually start to hate :(

      It's gotten to the point after 15 years that I've stopped trying, for fear of ruining even more good music.

      I have noticed too that some people are more/less prone to this, which makes me wonder: is anyone completely immune? Are there people who, no matter how often they hear a song, will still love it?

That's a "feature" of the vehicle's infotainment system. Some of the vehicles I've driven run Music the moment I connect my phone. Others are more respectful and wait for me to tell them to play something.

The aftermarket CarPlay adapter I installed in our Toyota is in the latter group. When I climb into the car, the CarPlay UI pops up on the vehicle's screen, ready for me to ask it to do something. Until I do, it does nothing other than show the homescreen with icons on it. A Ford I rented would fire up Music the second I plugged my phone in.

  • At least on the android side, that's a setting. Not sure about the defaults though

    • Hmmm, I’d have to see it. It’s basically the car saying “ooh you’re an MP3 player, play some music!”, and the phone is like, “oh, okay, you’re relaying your owner’s request so I’ll take your word for it”.

Have you tried “ A a a a a Very Good Song”?

It is 9 minutes of silence so that U2 album you never asked for doesn’t start playing at the most dangerous part of the journey.

Yes! "Aaron Burr, Sir" starts in Apple Music. "Hey, Siri shuffle liked songs on Spotify." Queue "Aaron Burr, Sir" again until I pick up my phone and tap Spotify. Make it stop.