Permanently Stop iTunes Auto-Loading

I have an early 2013 Retina MacBook Pro and I'm absolutely fed up with iTunes loading. I never use it and I never will.

As far as I can tell I've tried every suggestion to stop it from loading of it's own accord. The most common suggestion is to remove the iTunes Helper from my accounts Login Items which I have done ... repeatedly. It always worms it's way back in somehow.

How can I disable this app permanently? I simply don't want it to ever run ... ever. Only if I launch it manually.

Short question, many solutions

The easy way

Using the Terminal, unregister all the links from you file types to iTunes /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -u /Applications/iTunes.app

If you still have trouble and iTunes opens automatically, check out RCDefaultApp. Old, but still working (right click->open...) http://www.rubicode.com/Software/Bundles.html#RCDefaultApp

Install, go to system preferences, disable all the "media" links to iTunes

"Quick and dirty" (Teminal)

First, do

sudo chown -R $USER /Applications/iTunes.app
chmod ugo-x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS

This will prevent iTunes from starting EVER. To start iTunes manually, do

chmod ugo+x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes; open /Applications/iTunes.app; chmod ugo-x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes

The way for the brave

Use duti, http://duti.org/documentation.html. Install using "brew install duti", make sure to have homebrew installed first (http://brew.sh). Remove all links to iTunes. Make sure to read Change file association in terminal? to get all current file types.