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

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.

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.

While his solution does make it work again for iTunes but, only when another media focus app is gone from the foreground. So not a 100 % fix. Deep Sky Diver said it himself, if you have a YouTube, or some other media, playing in the foreground the control key will be assigned to it instead of iTunes.

Not cool.

I tried the Safe Mode option, but it hasn't made any difference whatsoever. It worked fine when only iTunes was launched, but as soon as I launched Spotify, the controls interacted with Spotify, even when it is minimised and iTunes is not.

This is one of the most idiotic things Apple have ever done. It just doesn't make sense whatsoever, doesn't follow any logic at all (the controls seem to interact with the last programme able to use them, regardless of whether you are actually using it or not) and makes those buttons completely unsuable. The only thing I found to control either iTunes or Spotify is to control them using Remote or the Spotify app from my mobile. What kind of user experience is that????

I've just sent the feedback to apple as well.

Just baffling that this seemed like a good idea.)

When I watch YouTube movies I can now have two buttons to start/stop (space and play/pause, which is overkill because I'm going to be having the focus on the movie anyway (I'm not going to turn on a movie and not watch it...) and I have no control over the music or podcast that was playing.

This is just stupid.

It seems as though you have to bring up the "services" menu once per application to enable the shortcuts to work. Before you do this, the shortcut FKeys just give a system beep. Once you go to Application > Service, and don't even select anything, just get the menu to show... suddenly the FKey shortcuts are enabled for that app.

Hi Deep Sky Diver,

I tried your solution, but it doesn't work. It is clear that the behaviour of the media key has been changed on purpose, they only affect the current/latest media played. I have this issue when scrolling facebook, if I play a video and want to pause iTunes, media keys affect the video in Safari. This happens EVEN if Safari is no longer the active window or the video has stopped playing!

I followed your steps but the issue is still there.

Anyways, thank you for your attempt and please check whether this happens again to your macOS.

This solution does not work if you are expecting the media keys to behave as they did, ie always controlling iTunes, no matter what other apps or webpages are open. I find the new behaviour makes those keys next to useless. I want those keys to control iTunes, and iTunes only.

Unfortunately, this does not work. As mentioned many times in this thread, iTunes alone works fine. Goto some web page with a video or sound bite, hit Play/Pause to pause iTunes and you'll end up with 2 kinds of media playing.

In my case after having done this, I cannot get iTunes to react to media keys again at all!

I'm planning on moving my system back to Sierra during the holidays as High Sierra has little to no benefits and this clearly broken media key behaviour is driving me crazy…

Unfortunately, this only helps until you open youtube or almost any other page containing media in Safari.

The best way would be if this got fixed in the system (at least we should have a pref restricting this behaviour to music players).

I don't really see the point of having this work on foreground video players since the great thing about those media keys was that you DID NOT have to bring your current music player (iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify etc) to the foreground just to pause (music)playback so you can watch a video, than bring your music player into the foreground again to resume (music)playback AFTER watching the video…

I agree. The play button used to start itunes automatically in the background. That no longer seems to work.

Yes - this is very bat.

Everybody used to control iTunes by keyboard - it's quick and intuitive.

Typical Apple Post-Jobs solution.

Absurd decisions without giving the user the choice. 👿

This didn't work. The media keys still behave by only working on the most recently opened app or web page with playable media.

Darn, you're right. "the most recently opened media application" was the key. I didn't try to open another one.

I confirm the trick doesn't work. 😟