ituneskeyboardmacosmediaplayer
On my Macbook, if I press the play/pause button (F8) with no other context, MacOS (Mojave) seems to default to opening up iTunes, and playing a particular track. (Maybe the first alphabetically in my entire collection, not sure). I really don't like this particular track 🙂
Is there anyway I could change this behaviour? For instance, opening Spotify and playing a certain playlist there?
(It's the newer generation bluetooth Apple keyboard, if that matters.)
I finally just figured it out! It turns out that I had a Quicktime process that was stopped (I had done an open on an avi file on the command line.) A kill -CONT on the pid allowed it to continue so I could close it and now I have my keys back!
You can do this with ControllerMate:
And a little little AppleScript (each line for each function):
tell application "Spotify" to playpause
tell application "Spotify" to next track
tell application "Spotify" to previous track
If you open QuickTime Player it will silently ignore the play/pause button and prevent iTunes from being opened, if you don't iTunes will still try to play something. Another solution to prevent iTunes from starting is to disable the 'Remote Control Daemon', how to do this is explained in detail on superuser.
Best Answer
This is a old post but the software recommend Beardedspice works fine on my Mac. Please read the full answer because it provides much more detail.