Spacebar doesn't start/stop music after you hide the app on Mac. 5+ year bug Spotify will NEVER fix.

[Conanthebarb]

You all know what I'm talking about. Space bar never starts/stops the music in the Spotify app for Mac after you use keyboard command + H to hide the app. This bug is at least 5+ years and Spotify refuses to get off their lazy asses to fix it. What a complete joke.

[Amay]

Hey @Conanthebarb, welcome to the Spotify Community! 🎵

In modern laptops like Mac or Windows, you can only use keyboard shortcuts with apps that are currently in focus (in-use). For example, if you have two media apps open, but both are in the background or hidden, then the keyboard shortcuts will most likely never interact with their player.

There could be exceptions, like if the keyboard has media keys that interact with the OS, then it could work with the apps as well, but there is no guarantee. This is actually the expected behaviour.

I hope that makes things clear. For anything else, don't hesitate to reach out. 🙂

[dapollo]

Plan

Premium

Country

Thailand

Device

Macbook M1 Max

Operating System

MacOS 15.5

My Question or Issue

In the past, I could open Spotify with Spotlight or CMD+Tab (or 3rd party launchers like Raycast) and immediately hit the spacebar to play. Sometime in the last month or two, this stopped being the case. Now, I need to get Spotify to be the top-level window and then hit Tab to focus INTO the window of Spotify before the spacebar can be used to play or pause the music.

[Conanthebarb]

Terrible, useless answer that neither addresses my issue nor solves it.