After installing Amazon Music on my mac, I noticed this background task “Amazon Music Helper” running. I tried to kill it, it came back.
The fix I used was to remove execute permission on that file:
Then kill the process again and it shouldn’t come back.
I have bought music since then and find that all the features (that I use) work fine. This thing isn’t even needed!
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Thank you for this!
Thanks!
what a pain. actually it’s being respawned by a launch daemon installed in the user domain.
what I did was this:
1. quit the Amazon Music app
2. unload the daemon. in terminal:
launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.amazon.music.plist
3. edit that daemon .plist file and change KEEP ALIVE and LAUNCH AT LOAD to FALSE.
4. Lock that plist file.
Now the f*cker won’t run when you start Amazon Music.
Thanks redrocklobster for cluing me about the launch daemon.
However, I found (with Amazon Music 3.9.5 anyway) that after editing the plist, running Amazon Music App would restore the daemon plist to it’s original config.
Changing file owner and group so as to only leave the app with read permissions, resulted in the app failing to launch.
So in the end I deleted the whole mess; app and launch daemon. Uninstall is what I wanted to do in the first place – except that amazon provides no uninstall that I could find. Deleting the app file from Applications would have been adequate, but I wanted to also get rid of the nasty little self-launching piece that I knew was buried somewhere – I don’t like loose ends.
Thanks again, and now I know to NEVER AGAIN buy MP3s from Amazon.
I noticed that when I turned off the “launch from the web” and “stay synched with iTunes” settings, the helper went away. Not sure about the daemon though.
Scott’s solution was the most elegant and effective.
Thank you! I now have my CPU back! 🙂
This solution is the best. Just turning OFF launch from the web and killing the Amazon Helper process fixed it completely.
You could make your `chmod -x` fix permanent by doing `sudo chattr +i` on that same file. This will set the “immutable” attribute on the file that you’ve `-x`’d. This causes subsequent users (even the owner of the file, or even root) from being able to `chmod +x` the file without first `sudo chattr -i` the file.
Apparently my Linux background betrays me – on OSX, `chattr +i` is spelled differently:
`sudo chflags schg `
`sudo chflags uchg `
Thanks – noticed a random port open when I scanned localhost (port 18800) it took me a while to figure out what was going on. Glad I found this article. Comments are useful too.
thanks!
I opened the Amazon Music app to show its contents, navigated to find the Amazon Music Helper app and moved it to the trash. The app seems to work and the problems caused by the helper appear to be gone.
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