Keep media keys fixed to music

paulminors · July 21, 2021, 7:50pm

I’m sure there’s a simple solution, but can’t find it.

How do I lock my media keys so they only control music and not the actively playing media (e.g. YouTube)?

ybbond · July 21, 2021, 8:07pm

one approach I can think of is by using combination of Karabiner Elements and Keyboard Maestro.

In Karabiner, set media key “Play/Pause” to F20 (or any number greater than 12 for convenience)
In Keyboard Maestro, send that key directly to Music.app, or open it if not open yet.

I have similar configuration, but instead, I force the Play/Pause key to send to IINA or Spotify. This will replace the annoying default behavior of Play/Pause key invoking Music.app.

karlnyhus · July 21, 2021, 9:29pm

This is what I used to use GitHub - Media Key Forwarder for iTunes and Spotify. The developer kept up with a couple of Apple’s revs of the macOS operating systems, but has now bailed with this message, “I no longer maintain Mac Media Key Forwarder because I moved to Linux. If you have time to maintain it feel free to fork it and write me”

He recommended looking at BeardedSpice, which doesn’t seem to understand the M1 Mac or Big Sur.

paulminors · July 21, 2021, 10:40pm

Thanks for the suggestions!

shandy · July 22, 2021, 10:14am

I implemented this via BetterTouchTool (BTT).

It intercepts play/skip/back media keypresses and sends the relevant keyboard shortcut to Spotify.

paulminors · July 22, 2021, 7:33pm

@shandy , are you able to share a screenshot of how you have this set up?

shandy · July 22, 2021, 8:34pm

Sure.

paulminors · July 22, 2021, 10:57pm

This is perfect, thanks!

ybbond · July 23, 2021, 3:36am

BTT can intercept media keys?? I never tried that before. I thought as KM (which seems more machine level) cannot intercept media keys, so does BTT (which seems more higher level).

Even with the unavailability of IF-ELSE (that I need to dictate IINA/Spotify/Pocket Casts) that may come in handy. Thanks!

lightningxcookie · July 23, 2021, 4:09am

Been waiting for a good replacement for Mac Media Key Forwarder! Since it’s open source I was wondering how difficult it would be to update the app for new OSes, maybe modernise it in Swift… but haven’t had more time to look into this.

karlnyhus · July 23, 2021, 4:33am

Go for it and keep us posted.

lightningxcookie · October 23, 2021, 3:55am

Oh yeah, kinda forgot about this

Someone recompiled the existing MMKF to make it native for Apple Silicon: Releases · kalafalas/macmediakeyforwarder · GitHub

And then a few weeks ago I rewrote all the code in Swift. It all works, just need a name and an icon for it and I’ll put it up on GitHub.