How to use multimedia hot-keys from hardware keyboard on QMMP audio player

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Published on - Listed in Hardware Linux Multimedia


On my main Linux workstation, a classical desktop (tower) computer, I mostly listen to some music streams such as Klassik Radio Select or songs on Soundcloud. Sometimes, if I'm in the mood, I go back to my own audio library and play some songs from there.

As I've always been a Winamp fan back in my Windows days, I've switched to the QMMP audio player a few years ago (QMMP supports Winamp skins). The annoying part? When I wanted to skip a song (next) I always needed to have QMMP in the foregound and either use the next button or the typical Winamp short key [b]. When this happens multiple times within an hour, my work efficiency decreases. Time to solve this.

New keyboard with multimedia keys!

I've been using a very boring and standard keyboard with a numpad but without any extra keys for years. But I knew the solution would be a keyboard with additional (multimedia) keys. Recent Linux distributions, including Linux Mint that I use, perfectly handle additional keys (or at worst you can configure them in keyboard hot key settings).

I finally decided for an inexpensive standard keyboard with additional hot keys on the top from DELL:

Keyboard with multimedia hot keys from DELL

Immediately after plugging the new keyboard in, everything worked out of the box, including the volume wheel. Everything? Let's try QMMP, the main purpose I got the new keyboard.

Multimedia hot-keys have no effect on QMMP

After starting QMMP and keeping it run in the background, I was disappointed to find out that none of the multimedia hot keys (Back, Play/Pause, Next) had no effect on QMMP.

Even with QMMP running in the foreground, the only thing happening was a "denied" icon appearing on the (Cinnamon) desktop:

What the...! That was the goal to control QMMP with these keys!

There's a hot-key plugin for this

After some research across (some very old) discussions, I found a couple of hints which pointed to a global hotkey plugin:

I've tested this again with a freshly installed qmmp-0.7.6, and as soon as I enable global hotkeys plugin (even before I configure any keys), the multimedia keys on my keyboard work.

I checked the QMMP Settings and under "Plugins" there are a lot of plugins available, most of them are disabled by default.

Under the "General" section, I found two plugins related to hot keys:

  • Gnome Hotkey Plugin
  • Global Hotkey Plugin

After enabling the first one (Gnome Hotkey Plugin), the multimedia hot-keys on the keyboard immediately started to work and I was able to control QMMP with them as intended (without needing to restart QMMP). Hurray!

 


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James from wrote on Aug 13th, 2024:

Thank you so much! I've been using QMMP on Windows for a few months and this was an annoyance for me. Turning on Global Hotkey Plugin straight away fixed it for though!


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