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