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

I also agree. Just realized this was happening and find it very frustrating.

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Unrelated, but for what it's worth: the Reply and I have this question too buttons didn't work in Safari. I had to use Chrome...

Well, yeah kinda the same here. First it all worked fine. At least i could get iTunes to respond. But as soon as for instance a Vimeo movie plays in Safari, it all works backwards again. Dangit. It makes absolutely no sense, usability-wise.

Here's how crazy it's gotten for me:

iTunes is playing.

I open a video in safari, it starts playing.

I hit pause on my keyboard to pause itunes.

iTunes keeps playing, my video keeps playing, and an ad for that video STARTS playing over the video itself.

There are also lots of instances where hitting pause will play sound effects on websites, sounds that are just regular HTML5 audio elements played normally by javascript.

This is nuts.

I agree. This new functionality is not good. If you happen to have looked at Facebook in Safari since having focus on Spotify then the play button simply replays the FB "message received" sound instead of pausing my music. A real pain when the phone is ringing!

an *UPDATE*

This media button thing is really getting worse and worse, I just received a phone call on my iPhone and, as usual, also my MacBook Pro rang. I wanted to stop music, the play/pause button ACCEPTED the phone call and DID NOT stop the music. What if I wanted to stop the music and take the phone call from my iPhone instead of from my mac?

HOW DOES THIS MAKE SOME SORT OF SENSE?

Did not work. Rebooted, no affect on Safari being able to steal the play/pause buttons. Also deleting that file dumped all of my custom made keyboard shortcuts, and restoring it did not bring them back. I suggest not trying this suggestion.

13.1 has released and it still behaves the same way.

This is ridiculous, this is the most unintuitive change apple has ever pulled off.

I mean what's the point exactly? I can think of no situation at all where this new behavior would actually come in handy. NONE.

I'm not sure you if you realize this, but when a post of instructions starts with "Keep calm...", the comments that follow are easily seen as having a condescending tone. This off-putting beginning might cause people to skip past your extremely helpful advice. 😐

This has been bugging the **** out of me since i updated. Even if i quit safari i still don't get the controls back right away. i play iTunes in the background while i work and if i go to facebook and a video plays i have to open iTunes and pause it or skip to a song by hand. This *****. I dont want to pay for some 3rd party app to fix it, I want Apple to FIX it.

When I have webwhatsapp open in the background and I hit the Play/Pause button, it even plays the sounds of a message coming in again, although I'm not getting message hahahahahahahhaha. What a retardet functionality apple made with this 😠

That didn't work for me on my old Mac, but I don't think it's (necessarily) a cache problem. I had it immediately on a brand new MacBook Pro, so unless Apple is shipping them with preloaded caches for my "convenience", it looks like more of a deliberate behavior change. One for which user-settable preferences would be very helpful.

I just upgraded to High Sierra today, unaware of this ridiculous behaviour.

In my 16 years as a Mac user I've never been disappointed - until now. This is like the worst decision to change the key behaviour like that. I was using the play/pause/forward/rewind keys all the time to control my iTunes or Spotify.

I've sent virtual ***** slaps to the person behind this decision 😉 and reported to Apple officially.

Please just let us, the users, determine what to control with the keys.

deep sky diver solution doesn't fix the problem. period. this forum has become a place for advertising people's specially designed apps to address it but we shouldn't have to download a mostly useless application from strangers to fix this.

Hi, That solution does work for me, however, it doesn't stick. I find I need to do this once a day. Here's a little more info.

I'll need to do this if the computer was turned off over night (aka restarted in the morning) or not.

Do you know where this cache is so that I can manually kill it?

I agree as well .. this became too much confusing and sometimes the keys don't know what. to play or pause ... I want it only for my iTunes as always worked. Now it always makes safari the priority ... it is frustrating. How can since Steve Jobs departure ... these guys managed to complicate what was so simple .. it is new apple logo? complicate it?

Give us back control over iTunes .... lol