On my main Linux workstation, a classical desktop (tower) computer, I mostly listen to some music streams such as Klassik Radio Select or songs on Soundcloud. Sometimes, if I'm in the mood, I go back to my own audio library and play some songs from there.
As I've always been a Winamp fan back in my Windows days, I've switched to the QMMP audio player a few years ago (QMMP supports Winamp skins). The annoying part? When I wanted to skip a song (next) I always needed to have QMMP in the foregound and either use the next button or the typical Winamp short key [b]. When this happens multiple times within an hour, my work efficiency decreases. Time to solve this.
I've been using a very boring and standard keyboard with a numpad but without any extra keys for years. But I knew the solution would be a keyboard with additional (multimedia) keys. Recent Linux distributions, including Linux Mint that I use, perfectly handle additional keys (or at worst you can configure them in keyboard hot key settings).
I finally decided for an inexpensive standard keyboard with additional hot keys on the top from DELL:
Immediately after plugging the new keyboard in, everything worked out of the box, including the volume wheel. Everything? Let's try QMMP, the main purpose I got the new keyboard.
After starting QMMP and keeping it run in the background, I was disappointed to find out that none of the multimedia hot keys (Back, Play/Pause, Next) had no effect on QMMP.
Even with QMMP running in the foreground, the only thing happening was a "denied" icon appearing on the (Cinnamon) desktop:
What the...! That was the goal to control QMMP with these keys!
After some research across (some very old) discussions, I found a couple of hints which pointed to a global hotkey plugin:
I've tested this again with a freshly installed qmmp-0.7.6, and as soon as I enable global hotkeys plugin (even before I configure any keys), the multimedia keys on my keyboard work.
I checked the QMMP Settings and under "Plugins" there are a lot of plugins available, most of them are disabled by default.
Under the "General" section, I found two plugins related to hot keys:
After enabling the first one (Gnome Hotkey Plugin), the multimedia hot-keys on the keyboard immediately started to work and I was able to control QMMP with them as intended (without needing to restart QMMP). Hurray!
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