Play/Pause key on Apple Keyboards launches iTunes

09. Nov, 2009 4 Comments

Pressing the Play/Pause key on an Apple Keyboard under 10.6 Snow Leopard will launch iTunes. A second press of the key will start play of the last-selected track or playlist. There are conflicting reports about this behavior on 10.5 Leopard. After an informal Twitter survey, some users reported this same behavior, others reported nothing. This suggests that the feature works in Leopard, but some applications may cause conflicts or altered shortcut bindings.

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Hardware, Snow Leopard
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4 Responses to “Play/Pause key on Apple Keyboards launches iTunes”

  1. asdff Reply 10. Nov, 2009 at 5:06 am

    This is a deeply annoying and unwanted “feature” for anyone who uses a media player other than iTunes. The play/pause, forward, back buttons produce system-wide events which are picked up by whichever running apps respond to them, but having iTunes launch breaks this functionality because it stupidly intrudes on whatever you're trying to do

  2. Matthias Lehming Reply 10. Nov, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Apparently, the 10.6.2 update will fix that.

  3. aayush Reply 14. Nov, 2009 at 5:29 pm

    No, it didn’t.

  4. Jerry Reply 15. Nov, 2009 at 5:49 am

    It is quite annoying, but I have a simple workaround!

    If you start QuickTime Player 10 without opening a video, you can once again use the media keys for other apps (Spotify, in my case).

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