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[Desktop] Global HotKeys for Pause/Play, Skip, etc.

It would be nice to have an Global Hotkey so you can pause/play your music while browsing and not switching between screens. Or when you are gaming and you want another song but you don't want to alt tab and stay idle, a (customizable?)  Global Hotkey(i.g. ctrl+shift+right) would be such an great improvement in the usefulness of Spotify.

Updated on 2023-05-23

Hey everyone,

 

Thanks for coming to the Spotify Idea Exchange.

 

We've discussed this idea and while it is interesting, we don't have any immediate plans to implement this. If we do have any new information to share, rest assured we'll check back in here with a new status.

 

More info on why your idea has been closed can be found here.

Comments
aebrinks

 I can't use AutoHotKeys because I am on a work computer, and I'm not the admin, so I can't download it. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Instead of making so many people download this and find a script to paste in, could you please add this to Spotify so that something as simple as global hotkeys can be available for everyone without jumping through all these hoops? My job requires efficiency and it's such a waste of time to mouse over to Spotify in order to skip a song. 

davenportcol

 I have a key board that has the play/pause buttens and spotify dose not respond if I press it. And please add the ability to chage this in spotifys settings.

prissrox

My Surface Pro keyboard does NOT have a "next song" button on the keyboard like my old HP laptop did. Please add a shortcut for this I always use Spotify while at work and it would be really helpful!!! 

Malurth

The explanation on offer here from Spotify is frankly asinine.

 

First of all, not everyone is using a keyboard with access to all these features.

 

Further, all keyboards are missing a lot of available features. When I used foobar2000 as my music player of choice, I had a LOT of functions assigned to global hotkeys, that are never on a keyboard. Aside from the basic Play/Pause, Next, and Previous, I had Volume Up/Down, Goto Random Song, and playback modes Shuffle Play, Sequential Play, and Repeat Song. I still remember all the keybinds, I used Ctrl+Shift for all of them, and then Q for repeat, W for shuffle, E for sequential, and R for random. The arrow keys were used for previous/next/volume up/down. This allowed me to rarely ever have to actually focus the window and manually select anything, which is great. Not having this functionality is pretty brutal, only surpassed by having no kind of star rating system.

QuantumLTU

Well, with Toastify getting broken with the latest update, this feature is now a must. Having to get to the app to do basic stuff like playing/pausing a song is extremely annoying, and as is said in this thread many times, not all people have keyboards with media keys. If you implement this feature it will be great!

21l7ba7vsogifg3

Pathetic that Spotify refuse to add this extremely basic feature that most media players have built-in. It would take a qualified developer a few hours tops to add this functionality but instead Spotify bury their head in the sands and ignore the massive demand for this feature for so long. On top of that they actually break third party programs that provide this functionality (toastify). Telling people to use AutoHotkey is also ridiculous especially as this program is detected as a cheat by multiple games. I'm not going to get banned from games just so that I can pause/skip/adjust the volume of my media. I'll just cancel my subscription and either go with a company who cares about basic functionality or just go back to purchasing individual music and using my own media player.

davenportcol
Me too. Sopotify says that they will not add it because keyboard have the
stop, skip and play but not every keyboard has those buttons or they don't
work on sopotify.
plopkonijn

Its because their dev team has been stopified.

davenportcol
Yeah even their competitors actually have those buttons working and everything actually works instead of saying it works but it doesn't
jiresrad

+1 please, add global func keys