EPTI plan to rectify this in this little post.
Quite a few music players have global hotkey support, for example winamp or foobar2000, I will stick to foobar2k because that is what I use.
What are global hotkeys? They are simple hotkeys usable from anywhere that you can control your music player with.
When I press ctrl+alt+insert the playback starts,
ctrl+alt+home pauses,
ctrl+alt+pageup goes to the previous track
ctrl+alt+pagedown goes to the next track
ctrl+alt+up arrow increases the volume
ctrl+alt+down arrow decreases it
ctrl+alt+left arrow rewinds
ctrl+alt+right arrows skips forward
ctrl+shift+insert plays a random song in the playlist
ctrl+shift+pageup changes to the default playback order
ctrl+shift+pagedown changes to random playback order
These might seem like a lot of keybinds to memorize, but honestly they are quite intuitive (you will never have to think about the arrow keys, thats for sure).
Let me tell you my "workflow" in foorbar2k.
I have the playback order set to the default, that means we just simply go down the playlist, if I encounter a track that I don't like, I have a few options:
if I don't want to listen to that specific song, I just skip to the next song with ctrl+alt+pagedown, If I'm not in the mood for the whole album, I press ctrl+shift+insert to skip to a random song (and spam it until something good comes up
.If you are looking for these settings in foobar, let me give you a screenshot for it:
![[image loading]](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/134488/foobar-tlblog-shortcuts.jpg)
Notice that you have to select the Global Hotkey box, look for what action you want it to do, and hit the keys you want bound in the Key area.
Edit: LSB provided a screenshot for the winamp hotkey settings here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=7485224 give him a thanks!
Allow me to plug foobar2k too a little:
- it's very minimalistic, doesn't require you to install it,
and has all of the features you would probably expect
- multiple playlist support (I personally don't use this one at all)
- ReplayGain support, so all of your music has the same volume, you don't have to adjust the volume at every other track
- very configurable, and very light on system resources. I usually don't switch my computer off, and winamp had many memory leaks, this one alone made me switch.
- It also has better volume management than winamp (you can specify the exact dB you want the volume slider to work with, so you can make it so low but still audible as you want, which I had problems with with winamp)
- Searching works mostly the same as in winamp, but when selecting a song, foobar jumps to it straightaway which is a tad nicer.
Here is how my foobar looks:
![[image loading]](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/134488/foobar-tlblog-main.jpg)
And if you want to give it a try, you can download it here:
sztanpet's foobar setup
It doesn't require an install or anything, just extract it and run foobar2000.exe, setup your media library and listen away. All of the global hotkeys are already set.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/CuD8m.png)
