I occasionally play music using itunes, and I tend to pause the music rather than e.g. quitting from itunes.
This afternoon I received an email with an audio attachment, which I played.
As soon as the playback finished, itunes started playing, quite likely the song I had paused 2 weeks ago.
I don't ever want it to do that again.
Is there any way to control this behaviour other than explicitly quitting from itunes whenever I'm done with it, and making sure I don't select "Open at login" in options?
I'm running OS X version 10.9.4, and I'm not a power user.
"About itunes" isn't cooperating with me – it scrolls as I try to record things – so the itunes version I'm running is anyone's guess (whatever IT put on the system). It might be 11.2.1 (1) 64-bit.
[edit: 1 day later, I brought up itunes, and found that the email attachment had become one of the songs itunes was willing to play. Not only that, it had been added to the front of the list of things to play, such that when I unpaused itunes, it started playing the voicemail message(!) – not e.g. the song it had been on when I had most recently paused and then quit itunes. I had never ever told itunes to play that attachment, save it, or add it to my library. All I had ever done was doubleclicked on the attachment in Outlook.]
Best Answer
"This afternoon I received an email with an audio attachment, which I played."
Did you double-click it, or Open, which would open it in iTunes?
Once you've set iTunes going it will then follow its pre-set behaviour, which includes playing the following song.
If you don't want to bother iTunes at all with the audio file, you can simply select it & tap Space Bar, which will make Quick Look play it instead. This won't touch iTunes, won't add it to its data storage, nor will it then play anything else once it's finished.
You can start/pause or change playback location. Space Bar again will close it.
The only thing you can't do is select something else in the same app whilst it's playing, or it will Quick Look that instead.