Help Make Keyboard Volume Buttons Control OS X Sound Levels

Software
1

I have an iMac and a third party keyboard that was meant for Mac, has Mac option/command buttons, and has brightness and volume buttons built into the function keys.

The brightness has always worked out of the box. But I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the volume buttons to work. All of my mac laptops have volume buttons in the function row and those work great, so it seems like it should be possible on the iMac.

2

You could try Karabiner-Elements to remap the keys.
I use it to remap my caps-lock key to something useful.

3

Remap it to what? How do I tell OS X that a certain key means volume up, volume down, mute?

It was automatically part of my macbook laptops key set.

4

Bump to top. Still haven’t found a way to do this. Anyone know if there’s a way to have OS X set volume on an iMac by keymapping?

5

You can do this with Better Touch Tool.

Here’s a video of me remapping ctrl+shift+option+command+d to volume down, and ctrl+shift+option+command+u to volume up.

6

Thank you, John!

This does appear to work, but I will continue to look for a native OS X solution that doesn’t require a third party app. For security purposes, I’m hesitant to run an app like this just to do something simple like raise volume. There’s too much risk that it becomes a vector to take over the machine by a malicious third party.

Also, it doesn’t work that well. With the built in display brightness keyboard buttons on my iMac, I can hold down the button and it will continue to increase or decrease brightness until I let go. This is how the volume works on my Macbook laptops built in keyboard volume volumes.

Using this app, I can’t hold down and have to tap the button multiple times rapidly to change volume. It’s not really easier than using the mouse on the volume control to slide.

I was hoping that OS X had a built in way to handle volume control because it works just fine in every Macbook I’ve owned for over a decade. This is my first desktop and found it odd that the same keyboard buttons didn’t work out of the box to handle volume. Especially since the brightness keyboard buttons on the iMac work just fine.