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[Etsijä]

With earlier versions, it seemed impossible to specify this simple feature in Media Center - to use spacebar as a  play/pause button.  But with Media Center 20 whe behaviour has become really weird: I have two installs for the software, one on my desktop PC, running Win7, and another on my laptop, running Win10.

On my desktop, all of a sudden, spacebar DOES INVOKE play/pause.  On my laptop, however, it does not.

I am a dance teacher and am using my laptop to play the rehearsal music on my classes.  I really really need the spacebar functionality, as you can imagine it is much more difficult to be hitting that Play button constantly with my mouse.

Now, is there a configuration item somewhere which I need to toggle in order for my laptop also to use the spacebar as a play/pause button?

[JimH]

MC needs to have focus.  Click the mouse anywhere on MC first, then the spacebar should work.

[Etsijä]

MC needs to have focus.  Click the mouse anywhere on MC first, then the spacebar should work.

Alas, this is not as simple as that.  Now as I tested it, it needs to have focus on the upper portion of the window (the one where all the playback controls are) before SPACEBAR works.  In practise:
- you start the song
- you need to click with the mouse somewhere in the playback area of Jukebox window
- only after that, SPACEBAR works as a Play/Pause shortcut

Not very intuitive at all.

[blgentry]

I'm on a Mac, not Windows, so things might be a little different.  But I experienced pretty much exactly this when I started using MC20.  You had to have clicked in the middle somewhere:  Either in the content pane that shows songs/albums/artists, or up top like you described in the playback information area.

If I had clicked over on the left, in the tree navigation area, play/pause didn't work with the spacebar.  When I asked about this, I was told that spacebar has special meaning for navigating in that area.  I think it expands and contracts tree segments or something.  Frankly, I think this is a left over feature from way back and it makes little sense in the context of a modern music playing application.  Just my opinion.

I ended up figuring out how to map custom keys to make spacebar do Play/Pause *almost* everwhere.  This involved editing a file with specific syntax and putting it in a specific place for MC to pick it up and read it's configuration.  It's not super hard, but it's not super easy either.

While typing this I remembered that MC has several hot keys mapped that might help you though.  In particular:
<control>p

That should do Play/Pause pretty much EVERYWHERE in MC's interface.  Give it a try and see.  If you still want to remap spacebar, or any other key, you can.  It will just require some effort.

List of default hot keys:

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Keyboard_Hot-keys

How to map your own custom keys:

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/User_Defined_Global_Keyboard_Shortcuts

Brian.