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.
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:
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.
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!
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:
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!
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!
AWS Android Ansible Apache Apple Atlassian BSD Backup Bash Bluecoat CMS Chef Cloud Coding Consul Containers CouchDB DB DNS Database Databases Docker ELK Elasticsearch Filebeat FreeBSD Galera Git GlusterFS Grafana Graphics HAProxy HTML Hacks Hardware Icinga Influx Internet Java KVM Kibana Kodi Kubernetes LVM LXC Linux Logstash Mac Macintosh Mail MariaDB Minio MongoDB Monitoring Multimedia MySQL NFS Nagios Network Nginx OSSEC OTRS Office PGSQL PHP Perl Personal PostgreSQL Postgres PowerDNS Proxmox Proxy Python Rancher Rant Redis Roundcube SSL Samba Seafile Security Shell SmartOS Solaris Surveillance Systemd TLS Tomcat Ubuntu Unix VMWare VMware Varnish Virtualization Windows Wireless Wordpress Wyse ZFS Zoneminder