I originally ran XFCE, installed Audacious and set up hotkeys to make some of the F keys on my keyboard control the application.
Now I have switched to KDE Plasma, and switched to “Qt mode” instead of “GTK mode” inside Audacious (which makes it look much better on KDE Plasma), but the hotkeys are no longer working, and worse: there is nowhere to set them anew!
This completely cripples me as I depend on those F hotkeys to control playback.
Are the hotkeys for some reason not available when running Audacious on KDE Plasma and/or in “Qt mode”?
Mediakeys should actually work ootb, if your hardware is supported, I guess. In case it doesn’t or you want custom key-combos you can map keys either in Plasma’s system settings:
Yep. For some reason the media hotkeys don’t work ( at least, not on kubuntu. Does work on debian). So, till you find a solution or someone knows how to get it right, you could try this:
my razer keyboard has dedicated media keys and they were recognized by audacious as well as half a dozen other music players, but sometimes i had to find the right plugin to enable from the list.
laptop keypads might be a different case as some of those required the Fn key as well which is a hardware thing.
This is a known prob with audacious qt. You can try pretty much any player, it’ll work. Audacious is a nono on certain distros. Like I said, works just fine in debian. Could be a small lib or something missing.
First of all, I may have been unclear, but I’m not talking about dedicated media buttons on the physical keyboard. I have no such. Instead, I use F9 for pause/resume, F10 for next track and F11 for mute/unmute Audacious. Or rather, I used to do this. Now, as mentioned in my question, I can’t find any such plugin to set the keys. Or maybe I’m being blind to something obvious.
However, you made me aware of the keyboard shortcuts for “Media Controller” in KDE Plasma, so I was able to at least get the first two keys (the most important) set up. It works with Audacious for me now. Sadly, there is no “mute/unmute” in there, so I can no longer have such a hotkey, apparently.
I should probably point out that I already do have a “global mute/unmute” button (the Pause/Break key), but this mutes ALL sounds – not just what Audacious is playing (which is usually music). It’s not the end of the world, but still somehow frustrating. Now I can’t quickly mute the music while the rest of the audio keeps playing (such as unrelated video streams, background ambiance by mpv, etc.)…
Didn’t even know audacious-qt had a shortcut for mute. Which sounds reasonable really. Play/pause pretty much implements it. But I think you could make a bash script for it the likes of using an audtool command and assign a shortcut for it. Wild thinking though but maybe ’
audtool_cmd --set-volume 0’ could work. No idea really but worth a try if it’s really important.
Well, pause/resume does do it, but only for local files. Not if it’s an Internet radio stream. If you pause/resume that, the behaviour is less clear/defined/reliable than if you had actually just muted Audacious.
Now I’m very confused. Spacebar? The purpose of these hotkeys is to use them when Audacious is not in focus, and furthermore, spacebar only pauses/resumes anyway (when Audacious is focused)?
Yeah well, yes, it needs to be in focus. Unless you use the volume icon on the panel and adjust the slider for audacious, rightclick the audacious task ( which also has a mute) or right click the icon in the system tray and pause ( if you use it) I guess you’ll need to make a script. I’ve no idea if there’s another solution.
Yeah, and a new house to put a new computer with a new keyboard in it. The media keys won’t do him any good since they’ll mute every sound. If you want to mute audacious and keep all rest playing you’ll need that -t command with an assigned shortcut. Works just fine.
hmmh, ok, your mileage my vary because I’m on *BSD, running audacious 4.3.1 (QT Interface, OSS, Plasma-5.27.8, xorg)
For a test I just enabled and set up the global hotkeys plugin in audacious’ general section (see 2nd screenshot above) to mute when hitting f9 and it seems to work and only mutes the audacious audio stream.
But what would be the point of such a script? I already can pause/unpause with a global hotkey using KDE’s own mechanism (as explained earlier). But this doesn’t mute/unmute!
