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

[Wurdo]

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.

[plopkonijn]

They are doing nothing with the ideas/feedback. It's just a standard "this is a duplicate post". I'm guessing they dont have support/dev team anymore. Even the most simple media player has the support for global customisable hotkeys. But spotify is still living in the stoneage of interfaces...

[Elenkhos]

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@plopkonijn wrote:

They are doing nothing with the ideas/feedback. It's just a standard "this is a duplicate post". I'm guessing they dont have support/dev team anymore. Even the most simple media player has the support for global customisable hotkeys. But spotify is still living in the stoneage of interfaces...

Exatcly. Desktop version lacks very basic functionality like these hotkeys which should have been in the application right from the start.

Fortunately, with AutoHotkey these severe desing flaws can be fixed but it needs a bit of a work and coding.

[plopkonijn]

@Elenkhos
I have already tried that but had no succes myself. I also tried the AHK solutions others made, but those stopped working.
Do you have a working AHK script?

[Elenkhos]

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@plopkonijn wrote:

@Elenkhos
I have already tried that but had no succes myself. I also tried the AHK solutions others made, but those stopped working.
Do you have a working AHK script?

Yes, sort of. I have made my own script. The basic media controls (play/pause/next/previous) are really easy because you can just send Media_Play_Pause/Media_Next/Media_Prev. For volume control I use Windows volume mixer. With NirCmd you can adjust app specific windows volume so it's also quite easy to do.
Thumb up/down are harder to code because I haven't found a good way to do it in current version. You can of course do it the dirty way by opening Spotify window and using mouse click in specific location but it has quite severe limitations.

[ttom25rocks]

I find it rather unfortunate that there are no global hotkey options for Spotify. This is literally one of the most useful features Spotify could implement and I see no reason for not doing so. This would be a game-changer for Spotify and I guarantee it would bring even more people in if word got out that Spotify integrated global hotkey functionality within the application. Global hotkeys would be so so useful for just the average person searching the web, and especially for gamers who don't wish to tab out while playing a game just to change or pause a song. Instead, for example, they could simply press a key like "F2" and they'd be able to pause the music and not have to tab out-- potentially resulting in their video game character's death. This isn't a hard thing for Spotify to implement and has even been done by external developers for the app "Toastify," which allowed users to make their own global hotkeys that executed on-touch of the hotkey they assigned for a specific Spotify action. Seriously, this is what the community would love, and *needs* to be implemented. 

I hope Spotify takes another look at this problem and comes to the same conclusion as the vast majority of the community.

[Jenay51]

Hello,

I think that if Spotify ignores the good ideas and request of the people who pay to use it, those people should CANCEL Spotify.

Why pay for a new TV that doesn't have the channels you want, or a new refrigerator that melts your ice cream.

There are many choices today for everything. So if Spotify doesn't want to play SHUT THEM DOWN TURN THEM OFFFFFFFFF!



Jenay

[NATEM_28]

You can use LKJ as a skip or fast forward. It works on windows. 

[iDavidW]

If you guys are really justifying not implementing this because "people who need it can just install AutoHotKey and do it themselves", you might be so kind as to provide an example AHK script for cases where it's not as simple as that "add media keys" situation in the superuser article you linked to as an answer to this problem. It's not always that people don't have media keys. Sometimes they have them, but your application doesn't respond to them at all.
In my experience with two separate keyboards from different vendors, both used on a modern Win10 install, neither the WindowsStore or Win32 applications respond to media function keys, whether the application is in focus or not, nor do they respond to media function keys sent via AutoHotKey's classic way of sending, or the newer sendinput method...
As such, it took a much more complicated script to get this working, involving finding the Spotify window(s), focusing those, sending the normal hotkey inputs, and then minimizing them once more, which took enough time, googling, reading of AHK docs, and trial and error to setup, that I'm certain the average user would have given up and begrudgingly accepted that they'll have to switch to another service or media player if they really want access to this arguably basic and expected functionality...

[Jenay51]

I SAY IF SPOTIFY WON'T GIVE WHAT CUSTOMERS ASK FOR THAT IS REASONABLE I WOULD AND WOULD ENCOURAGE ALL TO LEAVE SPOTIFY. THERE ARE 2 MANY COMPANIES THESE DAYS.

[Streck0]

**bleep** it, Spotify. Do something about this situation already! My keybaord at work doesn't have multimedia hotkeys and, to be honest, I think they're a stupid idea anyway. There are too many programs with "media" functionality these days to control effectively which one is addressed. I'd rather be able to set obscure shortcuts myself so that I'm in charge of what reacts.