How can I pause Windows Media Player with my keyboard, without the default media player shortcut keys?

November 24, 2006 4:04 AM

How can I pause Windows Media Player with my keyboard, without the default media player shortcut keys?

I know that when you actually have Windows Media Player open or selected in the taskbar, Ctrl + P pauses it, but when I'm browsing in Firefox occasionally I want to just pause my music instantly with the keyboard, maybe with F5, F7, etc, whatever, I just want to be able to press one or two keys and have it pause straight away.

I've downloaded Winkey but that doesn't actually help unless you can give it the exact route to what the shortcut is supposed to do - what is the route for the command to pause??

Also I know it's lazy because I can easily just select the Media Player window, but I'm just wondering if there *is* an easier way.

posted by angryjellybean to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

AutoHotKey would probably be better for something like this.

If you switched to iTunes, and then iTunesKeys would give you the behavior you want very easily. But you probably don't want to do that or you would have already. :)
posted by grouse at 5:20 AM on November 24, 2006

I don't know how to do it in Windows Media Player, but WinAMP has this functionality built-in. I've even mapped "next song" to one of the side-buttons on my mouse this way.
posted by jozxyqk at 5:53 AM on November 24, 2006

I was looking for the exact same thing and I tried many different programs. AutoHotkey is definitely the most powerful but I eventually settled on HoeKey. Very easy to setup and works wonderfully. You should be able to find a guide to configuring Hoekey for that functionality here.
posted by coolin86 at 2:03 PM on November 24, 2006

Using AutoHotKey (which I am becoming very impressed with), you can remap a key or make a hotkey for a media keyboard's play/pause button. I've remapped my seemingly useless Pause/Break key to be a play/pause control by adding the following to my AHK script:

Pause::Media_Play_Pause

This toggles play/pause for Windows Media Player even if it's in mini mode.
posted by irv4oh at 11:19 PM on November 8, 2007