Keyboard play/pause button doesn't work on video podcasts

[alexdernie]

Plan

Premium

Country

United Kingdom

Device

MacBook Pro M4 Pro

Operating System

MacOS 26.1

My Question or Issue

I have two external monitors. While watching a podcast video on Spotify on my Mac, and I'm using my browser/any other app on an external monitor and then I click the 'play/pause' button on my keyboard, it doesn't work. This issue does not exist if I'm listening to an audio-only podcast, or music, or an audiobook. It's only for video podcasts. You'll also see that the play/pause button glitches on Spotify to show 'paused' when the video is in fact playing, or vice versa.

[Ivelina]

Hello @alexdernie,

Thanks for posting this thread in the Community!

Could you let us know if you noticed in case this started happening after something specific for the first time (an update for example)?

I did some testing on a MacBook and I think I could somewhat reproduce this. The play/pause button was glitching upon playing a video podcast episode like you mentioned, but I was still able to play/pause the episode. To clarify the situation a bit, it'd be helpful to let us know:

• Does the glitching happen if you're not using an external monitor?
• Is this happening both when you've got the video podcast episode in full screen, as well as minimized?
• Any other details you've noticed which could be helpful.

If you've not performed a clean reinstall already I recommend going for one just in case it makes a difference. It's more detailed than a regular one and helps resolve different issues caused by corrupted cache. 

Lastly, feel free to send us a video of the behavior, as well as the exact Spotify-version that this is happening on. You can either attach the video via the Insert Video option in the post editor or upload it to Google Drive and share the link with us.

Many thanks and we'll be on the lookout.

[alexdernie]

 Hi Ievelina,

I've made a screen recording - it's hard to show without you also seeing the keystrokes, but when it's paused and I hit play/pause button on my keyboard, it glitches the play/pause button on Spotify and nothing happens. Then I press it again and it starts playing, but you can see the play/pause button on Spotify is showing the play symbol, which is a bug and shows there's a glitch (it should show the pause symbol while the video is playing).

Here's the screen recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UMOYv0hti3CpI52UW94PF7saqW8lasXv/view?usp=sharing

To answer your questions:

• Does the glitching happen if you're not using an external monitor? Yes, it happens without any monitors connected too
• Is this happening both when you've got the video podcast episode in full screen, as well as minimized? Both minimzed and full screen
• Any other details you've noticed which could be helpful. Nothing else I can think of

Here's my app version:

Spotify for macOS (Apple Silicon)

1.2.77.358.g4339a634

Hope this is useful, looking forward to a fix - let me know if you need anything else.

[Ivelina]

Thank you for the quick response and cooperation @alexdernie. It's really appreciated!

I've forwarded this to the relevant team so that they can take a further look and as soon as there's an update on the matter, we'll make sure to let you know in the thread.

In the meantime, we're here if you need assistance with anything else.