So, I'm a longtime user and on-again-off-again beta tester (Hi Jim, Matt and any others still around that I used to chat with!). While I've consistently used MC for organization media/management, using it for actual playback has waxed and waned over the years depending on what I'm doing. I've been using MC more and more again lately for playback and while MC has always had some quirks all its own, this is one that I seem to be battling with constantly. If there's some combination of settings that will address this, I've been unable to suss out what it might be.
Quite simply, I want MC to behave like a native Windows application when it comes to how media keys and volume control work. I'd like for the playback media keys to control MC whether it's the active window or not, and I want the volume control key, whether it's on my keyboard, headset, or speakers to change the system volume, show the Windows volume UI, etc.
Currently, there are two media key modes (other than Disabled and Automatic).
1. App Commands: Leaves the volume control to Windows as I want, but doesn't control MC unless it's the focused window. For this reason I prefer to use the Hotkeys option. However...
2. Hotkeys: Controls MC no matter if it's the active window or not, but then the volume control keys are intercepted by MC as well. And then the behavior is all over the map depending on which volume mode I'm using.
If I have it set to application volume, then only MC's volume is changed rather than the full system volume. If I use System Volume, then I can change the full system volume, but there's no UI popup and I lose the ability to lower MC's volume in the mix. And most frustrating is that volume control on my Logitech G935 headset does nothing at all in either of these two modes. MC's UI shows the volume change, but the volume doesn't actually change. The only way my headset can actually control audio in MC is to use the Internal Volume setting, which I don't like because it doesn't play nice with Windows volume mixer. In every other Windows application, volume control works consistently whether I'm using the volume slider in Windows, on my keyboard, headset, or desktop speakers. Unfortunately this isn't the case with MC.
It seems like the current options are geared towards a use case where MC is the only thing generating audio on the system. And in that case it would be fine (although the lack of Windows Volume UI is still sorely missed), but neither of these are ideal when I'm doing something like playing a game with MC playing in the background. It's sort of forced my hand to just use Spotify if I want to do anything else that uses audio at the same time as listening to music. And I'd much prefer the higher quality audio that MC has to offer.
Help?
Can there be a third Media Key mode (or whatever would make this work)? One that behaves like Hotkeys for things like Play/Pause, Next, etc., meaning it works whether MC is in focus or not, but allows the volume keys to passthrough to Windows?
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Topic: Volume control and media keys (Read 3110 times)