Return of the Daemon

I’ve been enjoying having the new Apple Music service in iTunes quite a bit, but one thing has been driving me crazy: the keyboard controls don’t work anymore. Except they do.

Before 12.2, iTunes would infuriatingly launch every time you plugged a set of headphones into your laptop. I eventually found a post that identified the Remote Control Daemon as the culprit for this behavior. Simply unloading the daemon fixed the problem. No more iTunes launching when it wasn’t wanted, and the keyboard controls still worked. Until now that is.

Fortunately starting the service back up is as easy as:

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

Note that if you disabled the service to make double-sure it’d never run again, you may have to re-enable it by editing the following line in the plist.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Disabled</key>
    <false/> <!-- double negate here! -->
    ...
</dict>
</plist>

So far my keyboard controls are working again, and iTunes has yet to launch when plugging in headphones. Let’s hope it stays that way.