my iTunes is haunted

October 20, 2005 4:27 PM

Why does my iTunes keep opening (unprovoked)?

I'm running the latest update of Tiger and just sitting here surfing the web. iTunes starts up every 90 seconds for no apparent reason. I cannot figure out how this could possibly be happening. Is there a ghost in my powerbook?

posted by jmgorman to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Are you sure you don't have it set as your default audio player? Are you downloading music in the background (via, say, Acquisition)? Could be that it's a helper for something - Acq, for example, may be set up to launch iTunes and add the music to a particular playlist, or you could be loading pages with embedded sound files and iTunes is trying to play them?
posted by luriete at 4:33 PM on October 20, 2005

The only thing in the background a torrent coming down and I'm pretty sure it isnt that. This is too regular to have anything to do with the web - could it be some sort of virus?
posted by jmgorman at 4:50 PM on October 20, 2005

It would have to be some kind of background process. An applescript that runs perdocially, perhaps. Check your startup items in System Preferences -> User Accounts.
posted by zerolives at 4:53 PM on October 20, 2005

If it's a virus, you're the first person to get it. There are no reports on MacFixIt of anything like that.

If you're surfing on something like MySpace where people embed tracks in their profiles, it's possible that that would kick iTunes into action over and over.

Do you have any iTunes plugins installed, like iScrobbler for use with last.fm? Some of them can be buggy and could conceivably launch the program when you don't want them to.

Do you have an iPod connected to your Mac? If your iPod was screwy and rebooting continuously while plugged it, it could possibly be trigger iTunes to launch over and over.
posted by bcwinters at 4:58 PM on October 20, 2005

When all else fails, Fix Permissions.

When did this start? Things like this don't start happening on their own. What changed?
posted by mkultra at 5:07 PM on October 20, 2005

Do you have Konfabulator and an iTunes "remote control" widget (or some other add-on that provides some kind of added functionality to iTunes)? It sounds like something somewhere is runinng an AppleScript that tries to talk to iTunes. When a script does this, the Mac obligingly launches the application being addressed so it can reply to the script. (Smart scripters put some kind of test in to make sure the application is actually running first.)
posted by kindall at 5:24 PM on October 20, 2005

Nope, nope, nope and nope. It all started last night sometime after I decompressed a .rar file I downloaded via bittorrent. It ran fine, no problems. I then spent the rest of the night typing in Word, it kinda popped up when I wasn't paying attention. I noticed it this morning when my Safari was a bit sluggish. I quit iTunes (incase it was updating a podcast) and a short while later it opened back up. I just opened up my activity monitor, hopefully something will show up.
posted by jmgorman at 5:30 PM on October 20, 2005

Figured it out. I had a stuck itunes widget in my dashboard. It said I was playing a song and wondered why iTunes wasn't actually open. It would open every few minutes as the dock cycled through its updates. Just closed it and all is fixed.
posted by jmgorman at 5:34 PM on October 20, 2005

xTunes opens iTunes whenever I accidentally hit command+space. (Maybe this wouldn't be a problem for you; it was the default for both Spotlight and xTunes, and I changed Spotlight.)
posted by thejoshu at 6:10 PM on October 20, 2005