Keyboard Media Controls

[Isaac]

I'm a fan of the media controls my laptop keyboard has on it (play, pause, etc) but if I play a game (namely oblivion) they stop working until I alt-tab out, and I'm wondering if there is any way around this. I like to listen to music in the background, and its irritating to have to do all that to change tracks.

 

[gifi4]

Chances are this is a software problem, not hardware.

What media player are you using?
Winamp has toggles in the settings to control behaviour ragarding full screen applicatons.

 

[Isaac]

I'm using the Windows Media Player.I'm not sure if its 11 or 12. Its the one installed by default in Windows 7.

 

[FAST6191]

"windows media player"....

Anyway http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/index.htm?http://bmproductions.fixnum.org/wmpplus/ might well sort your problem. I have not tried it but that is probably because I would use itunes in preference to WMP and I truly detest itunes.

 

[Isaac]

Hmmm. Unfortunately that didn't work. I think I'll look into switching media players and seeing if that works. Any suggestions?

 

[FAST6191]

Depends what you want from your media player. For instance I do not give a damn about library functions if I have a playlist that I can make random (though a normal playlist works as I have a playlist generator in mp3tag, I care even less about media player support (any I have support the far superior method of drag and drop, or I have other tools like MediaMonkey to handle it[/url]), DNLA is a joke and everything I have uses good old fashioned network shares and given I tend to use external decoders/filters or even output into filtering hardware I do not much care about inbuilt filters.

To that end on windows I tend to go with media player classic (nowadays the mpc-hc fork that comes with the combined community codec pack). It starts no time at all, is pretty solid (certainly orders of magnitude better than WMP and itunes) and when combined with the CCCP stuff it plays basically everything. Others might opt for foobar2000 for music which is also fast, has some better playlist/library options, can play pretty much everything and does come with nice options (including things for computer game rips if you like that sort of thing).

In general have a look at the media options of https://ninite.com/ (ninite is a nice installer for multiple programs, if you are setting up new machines then I highly recommend it), if you can not find something you can get on with there then you have either gone wrong or have some exceedingly specific requirements.