General Question

Aqua's avatar

How do I adjust which apps are controlled by the play/pause button on my MacBook Pro?

Asked by Aqua (2546points) October 11th, 2010

I’m currently watching a movie using VLC, and occasionally I pause the movie to take some notes. The only problem is every time I hit the play/pause button it opens iTunes and plays/pauses videos/music in iTunes. I’ve resorted to turning the volume in iTunes all the way down, but for convenience and battery life, it would be a lot better if I only had one video player playing at a time. Does anyone know how I can get the play/pause button to only affect apps that are already open?

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3 Answers

whitenoise's avatar

You ight want to check here

A user called Michael Pitogo suggests the following (there are other suggestions too):


My temporary hack to stop it until Apple gives us a choice to disable this PITA feature.

Paste this into Apple Script Editor, compile it make sure there are no errors and save it as an App. When launched it simply asks you to enable or disable iTunes from launching by changing the execute permission. It stops iTunes from launching and the only thing you get when the play/pause button is pressed is a dock bounce and a console error.

display dialog “Do you want to enable or disable iTunes?” buttons {“Enable”, “Disable”} default button 1
if button returned of result is “Disable” then
do shell script “chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app” with administrator privileges
else
do shell script “chmod +x /Applications/iTunes.app” with administrator privileges
end if

xxii's avatar

Just a note… If you’re watching a movie in VLC, you can pause/play it by hitting the space bar.

Aqua's avatar

@whitenoise: That’s perfect. I’m gonna use this when I get around to it.
@xxii: Yeah, the only problem was that I was taking notes in NeoOffice, so I’d have to click or tab into VLC for the spacebar to work.

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