"Faking" Media Keys

[Armando Penblade]

Alright, you lot use and own a lot of mechanical keyboards (in other news, the sky is blue and full of clouds and ducks have bills), and a lot of the models I've seen seem to pare down the funky extras I've grown used to with my $10 Microsoft and Dell keyboards.

A big one for me is media keys. I play music from iTunes or MediaMonkey on my second monitor virtually 24/7, but when it comes time to game, watch videos on youtube, watch tv with the lady pal, or sleep, I like to be able to immediately turn off the music or adjust its volume without having to alt-tab or even click the media player window.

My current ComfortCurve2K has a play/pause button as well as vol up/down/mute keys, all of which my PC will obey regardless of what application has screen focus. The Back/Forward keys, tethered to the Media: Previous/Next actions by the Microsoft driver, do not work unless my media player has immediate focus, but even that's not too terrible.

I am considering a couple of mechanical keyboards that lack any sort of media keys whatsoever. Is there any application (say, a macro program or AutoHotKey) that could use a key-combo (say, Ctrl+F1) to mimic a media function? Even if there no actual physical key for that function on the kb? Moreover, would any of these methods work when my media application doesn't have focus?

This will be a deciding factor for me, so I thought I'd check with you lot

[Orphagn]

You might want to look into the Noppoo Choc Mini. Its limited media keys (Mute, Volume Down, Volume Up, Last track, Next track) works for WMP for me. Just tried it for iTunes, but only when it is the top window.

[SirDrexl]

You can map any key (except Break) to another through the registry if you're on Windows, and I think you can do it with other OSes as well.  The reason I decided against a tenkeyless was because I wanted dedicated (as in, no Fn) media keys, which I get by remapping the number pad keys.  Being a registry edit, nothing runs in the background this way.  I recommend a utility like Keytweak for this.  Note that you don't actually have to have the desired keys on the keyboard to use them, but the registry change only works for standard functions that keyboards can send without special drivers.  If you want to see what you can do, download Keytweak and try it out on your current keyboard.

If you want more functions, including multiple keypresses, you can use Autohotkey.

[Armando Penblade]

Thank you much, Drexl

[godly_music]

Winamp and Foobar2000 (and probably others) can do this without any extra application. Example:



Zehnertastatur is the num block, Leer is space.

[db_Iodine]

Winamp and Foobar2000 (and probably others) can do this without any extra application. Example:

Show Image

Zehnertastatur is the num block, Leer is space.

Just need to remember to make those keys global, like you have.

[BucklingSpring]

I don't think they play porn videos though.
That mute button really can come in handy.

LOL - To bad the question was MEDIA instead of ORGASM.
Cauz my wife knows numerous ways to simulate that key.