MySQL Connection Refused on MAMP Pro

The problem was that it was only letting me directly access the socket. Solution:

Go to the Server > MySQL tab and make sure that "Allow local access only" is not checked Click the apply button and everything works fine

I never used the MAMP distribution, but it sounds to me like your my.cnf have the skip-networking parameter set.

EDIT: A bit of googling showed that MAMP does in-fact set the skip-networking parameter as default. Simply comment out skip-networking in your configuration file and you should be fine :)