Option to prevent f8 from opening apple music (or other application)

Now users have to choose between disabling all F keys or installing a third-party app to gain functionality on one F key?! It really defeats the purpose of the function keys altogether.

It's really disruptive and annoying to be working in an application and having the Music app launch suddenly and unexpectedly. Disappointing to say the least.

Edit: I did find one workaround - you can press the fn key while hitting F8 for the desired result, but... still annoying. I don't know if I'll remember this every time I use the F8 key.

Turning off the Function keys works, provided you don't mind also losing audio volume, keyboard brightness and backlighting, microphone controls and playback controls, all embedded as shortcuts in the Function keys as well.

This F8 auto-launch is a really sneaky (and bad PR) move on Apple's part, another effort to ram Apple Music down our throats. I would have thought giving them $3,000.00 for a laptop would earn the right to not have their software - in direct competition with Spotify - force-fed.

TuringTest2 is right - the notunes app on GitHub is the one solution I've seen.... but then that requires download, install, setup, and have it running at every Login on every machine.

Try https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes.

tt2

Perhaps this article will help (to re-assign the F8 key):

How to use the function keys on your Mac - Apple Support