Play button (media buttons) behavior has changed for the worse.

I'm typing this in Safari. And I'm using the media keys to open, start, stop, go forward and backward, any track in iTunes - from Safari, from Mail, from Calendar and from any other open app I'm using. But before I emptied the caches, the media keys didn't work in iTunes at all.

Of course, if you open Youtube or any other Media app and keep that in the foreground, the media keys will act on that app or window, as they should. In that case, but only in that case, the media keys control the media in the active window. Which is totally logical in my view - the OS correctly assumes that you want to control the active window when that active window has media in it.

I don't think you understand the initial question. The issue that was posted is that the media buttons control the most recently opened media application weather it be iTunes/spotify/youtube. Not that they don't work at all. Deep Sky Divers solution only fixes the media buttons if they don't work at all.

No MrStig91, I came to these forums because I was frustrated by the keyboard media buttons not controlling iTunes anymore when I was in another screen, like Safari for example.

I was skeptical as well but I gave it a try and that solved the problem. Now I can start and stop iTunes from every virtual screen (I'm having Safari in full screen at the moment and I guarantee it works).

I don't know why it doesn't work for you (if you already tried it) but, trust me, it worked for my 2012 Mac Mini.

Dang. I was hoping I was wrong because I want this to go back to the old way. Maybe if we ask enough Apple will do it. I would also be happy if they just put an option in settings to turn this on or off.

This is a good attempt but a moot point. The media keys work, but they only work on iTunes until you open something else up such as youtube or a facebook video. Once you do that the active thing takes over and won't go back to controlling iTunes until you close the tab with the media. This is such a stupid move from Apple and I'm quite tempted to revert my iMac to Sierra because of this idiotic change. Half of the videos on Facebook are nothing I would want to watch, and if I want to watch a youtube video I pause iTunes and then control youtube with a click. I really hope they fix this or at least give their users an option because this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen and a major setback. 😠

MrStig91 wrote:

Try this once and let me know.

Play music on iTunes. In safari go to YouTube and pull up any video. Once the video starts playing push the pause button on your keyboard.

In my case, it pauses the video and NOT iTunes. This is not how I want it to work. I don’t want shortcut keys for YouTube.

FWIW, the issue only seems to occur with Safari. It works as before with Chrome and Firefox.

Such an annoying feature. It used to be rather intuitive; to could control web media easily with the spacebar while controlling iTunes ALWAYS with the media buttons, that perfectly made sense, was easy to use and caused no problems. Now they just screwed it all. I'm starting to get annoyed by the way Apple just plain ignores its users.

This this this. You are making the same point I’m trying to make. The space bar has always been a play/pause control for most online media. Why would I want to take the controls away from itunes to control something that already has a shortcut key?

I’m giving apple the benefit of the doubt. They may have thought this would be the better option, but I’m hoping on the next update they make this a setting you can change. You should be able to choose if you want the media keys to be dynamic (control different apps) or be locked to a certain app. Some people like this new behaviour, but I never want the keys to control anything but itunes.

Same problem. Incredibly annoying, since i always have iTunes playing in the background.

Watching something on Youtube just became ridiculously complicated, as now i have to pause the video right as it starts, bring up iTunes, click the pause button in the window and then go back to the video and resume it, and then make sure i close that Youtube tab if i want to resume iTunes using the media keys.

If 10mins later i want to watch some other Youtube video, i'd better just give up..

I could understand that some people like it this way (although i can't see why you'd take your hand off the mouse to hit the "shortcut" pause key, when a simple click anywhere on the video would've done it). But not having an option to stop this key remapping from happening is a serious oversight!

Most annoying thing.

I always have music playing in the background and when I open a video on youtube and want to pause the music to watch the video it pauses the video and i have to open iTunes and pause the music on the app.

Safe mode fix does not work here.

All I can offer by way of remedy isn't a solution to your specific problem, but maybe something that you can live with.

iTunes > Window > Mini Player

Grab the top edge of the album artwork this displays and shrink it down into the control bar until you can't make it be any shorter. Then do the same with the width. You will find that there are very few places to grab and drag this at this point, but just between the Close box and pop up Volume Adjust icon is a good place to yank it around into the top right corner of your Desktop where your Notifications appear. You normally look there to see what the next track is and sometimes aren't quick enough to glance over at the Notification before it is swept away, so now the Mini Player just does the same job, is there permanently, and actually takes up less screen real estate. Notifications will slide over this Mini Player even though it floats above all your open Applications for ready access. Soon enough muscle memory will let you slam the mouse cursor into the top right corner and then back a couple of inches to hit Play / Pause / Next

Unfortunately, this is the best solution that I can come up with until people make enough complaints to Apple and they update High Sierra to revert it back to the more ergonomic way it used to work. I don't know if it is something they can fix, or if it is down to Google, but I would like to see the icons that overlay YouTube videos be more widely spaced so their active areas can be expanded for touchscreen operation on my iPad Pro, also as I keep having to clean its screen of greasy finger prints from watching videos whilst cooking in my kitchen I'd like to be able to use my attached hybrid keyboard cover to Play / Pause / Next / Reload with Space / Space / Cursor Right / Cursor Left so I can keep the screen pristine, this doesn't interfere with comments as it won't think that you are editing anything until you tap on the input field to give it keyboard focus, although I suppose you could have Command E replace that finger contact, then Command P again to post your comment, using Command D to discard your comment.

Well, I'll shut up now as I'm just rambling.

:-D

This is a great solution, Bekir, It works like a charm! 🙂

Btw BetterTouchTool is a tiny utility totally worth the little price, I'm using it for several years but I totally ignored it was able to run scripts.

Now the behavior of old OS X media keys is restored, as the peace in the galaxy. 🙂

I have the same complaint about this change, however I kind of recovered the old behavior, I recommend you to take a look at BeardSpice (https://beardedspice.github.io) it allowed me to use again the media keys with Spotify.

Thanks for the proposed solution, but you did not understand the problem. The problem is that the media keys are not reserved for iTunes anymore. That was the useful function of them before. Now you control any app which is in the foreground. But this is useless, because you can just control them with shortcuts or mouse clicks. The true benefit used to be that you didn't have to switch apps to control an app (iTunes), which was running in the background.

TO EVERYONE:

the solution proposed by KRSTC works, even if it involves the purchase (or the 45 days trial) of a small utility called BetterTouchTool. Following the instructions on the link he posted I was able to restore the *correct* behavior of the media keys.

Of course we all hope Apple will restore the old method, for that please follow the link someone else posted in this thread and send Apple your feedback about it. More people will do and more possibilities there are that Apple will do that. I already did.

Writing on these forum is not a solution (there could be one if an user finds one), as usually Apple doesn't read posts.