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

I confirm Deep Sky Diver solution works.

Many thanks. 🙂

A very strange thing.... today the buttons work again!

The latest changes that I made yesterday to my mac were: disk permission repair and rebuild spotlight index...perhaps it could help...

There is a small application that addresses this High Sierra change in media key behaviour.

Here is a link to the developer's blog post:

http://milgra.com/high-sierra-media-key-enabler.html

I found this and it works great.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/15/how-to-fix-media-controls-high-sierra/

The problem is that it doesn't work like that. First of all, why would I ever need shortcut media keys for the "active window"? If I am actively in iTunes I don't need a special button to pause it. I want it to pause when its in the background. Before high sierra the media keys would always play and pause iTunes no matter what. If I started a youtube video then hit pause it would stop my music and the video would continue. Now if I start a youtube video I have to manually click back to iTunes and click the pause button with my pointer. Even though iTunes is then the active window is only controls the most recently opened window. It has nothing to do with being the active window. If I leave the youtube video open to watch later and just continue web browsing in a new tab, I can't control my music with the media keys. they now only function for the youtube tab that I'm not even looking at.

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

Please, we all need to file a feedback report : Product Feedback - Apple

Called apple all afternoon yesterday, they made me reinstall the OS and reset everything to then later find out that its a "feature" haha

This new behaviour is extremely annoying and I hope that it will be fixed in a preference asap. I often work in another app while listening to iTunes in the background. When i.e. a phone call comes in I could pause the music immediately with the media key and could return where I left. Now I have to turn down the computer volume but iTunes will play on in silence and I have no way to return to the exact part of music that I was listening to. Also the music will often play on in another room via Airplay which can also be annoying. When I watch a video this will always be in the foreground and I can pause it with the space bar. Apple has tried to fix something that was not broken.

You can write to them on twitter. They just called me this morning regarding another problem and I reached to them on twitter first. Twitter is public and they don't want to have a fuss, so they are more keen to listen there.

I rarely use my iTunes to play music, but today I did and noticed that the built-in Apple Keyboard buttons for play/pause/FWD/RWD keys no longer worked. Even in iTunes, they didn't respond. I saw here that maybe something in Safari had taken them over, so I quit Safari and now they work again. Starting Safari back up has not rendered them useless again yet, but maybe it was a particular site (Like the videos that play on Swagbucks, etc.) that did it, in addition to Safari being opened. At least it didn't require a restart and Safe Mode.

Try this:

Solution/Workaround for Mac OS High Sierra Unified Media Buttons (Play/Pause, Next and Previous Track) Problem – bekir s…

Add the Now Playing widget in the notification center

This workaround works for me for the time being. Use at you own risk. http://milgra.com/high-sierra-media-key-enabler.html

Here is an EASY fix for it. A simple app that you run. Nothing more

http://www.nerdgrade.com/fix-media-keys-high-sierra-macos/

Simply delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file to restore the original pre-High Sierra behavior.