Plexamp stealing media control keys?

It seems Plexamp 1.1.0 steals media control keys Play / Pause Forward / Backward on macOS 10.15.2 Catalina.

The keys mentioned do work in Plexamp but no longer work in Apples own Music.app.

Is there a way to get the keys to work again with Music.app or ideally work with both Music.app and Plexamp?

There are plenty of reports of Chrome being at fault for hijacking the media keys. Since Plexamp is an Electron app would assume it is at fault. Is there a way to solve this?

In theory I think the last app started owns the keys, so if you start Music.app after Plexamp it should steal them back?

I have confirmed that this behavior is how the media keys behave on a nearly daily basis. I run PlexAmp to play music, then I want to play something from another media player (such as MPV), so I hit pause to pause PlexAmp, then launch MPV to play the content I want to play. MPV now owns the media keys. Quit MPV and the media keys revert back to PlexAmp. I’ve do this at least once a day and some days I stack it 3-4 players deep where quitting the last player causes the media keys to go back to the previous player launched.

Thank you both for taking the time to respond to my question. I appreciated that very much.

Can partly confirm the behavior. I have two macs and since they differ will describe each. Lets start with

imac 10.15.2

  1. Open Plexamp results in it owning the media control keys :heavy_check_mark:

  2. Opening music does not result in it owning the media control keys ✘ (they remain with Plexamp, it does not matter if before opening music, Plexamp is paused or not)

  3. Quitting Plexamp and leaving music open results in media control keys controling music :heavy_check_mark:

  4. leaving music open and opening Plexamp results in media keys controlling Plexamp :heavy_check_mark:

This feels inconsistent and wrong. Not sure if this is a bug in macOS and even related to Plex at all. It seems what is happening when Plexamp is opened would be the expected behavior. Opening music should result in identical behavior - the app owning the media control keys - while that is not the case. Behavior is reproducible.

Mac Book TouchBar 10.15.2

This is more buggy thanks to the Touch Bar :frowning:

  1. Open Plexamp results in it owning the media control keys :heavy_check_mark:

  2. Opening music does not result in it owning the media control keys ✘ (they remain with Plexamp, it does not matter if before opening music, Plexamp is paused or not)

  3. Quitting Plexamp and leaving music open results in media control keys doing nothing ✘

  4. leaving music open and opening Plexamp results in media keys controlling Plexamp :heavy_check_mark:

Summary: There is a bug with macOS it seems in regards to how media control keys are assigned and another servere bug with the Touch Bar. Tried various steps to reset Touch Bar but so far no luck.

I believe you are running into issues with how the Music app operates with respect to the media keys. It has a special relationship with the media keys in that if no app currently owns the media keys, it defaults to the Music app.

Back in the days with iTunes, iTunes did not take the media keys from an app until you actually started playing something. If no app had the media keys, it would launch iTunes if it were not already running and start playing something. In what I stated above with the stacking of multiple players, I would at times launch iTunes and it never took the media keys until I played something and once I started playback of something it retained the media keys until I either quit it or launched a new player.

If this behavior is different with the Music app, then it is Apple’s bug and there’s absolutely nothing at all we can do about it. Given the huge number of serious regressions in Catalina, especially around the domains that used to be owned by iTunes, If this behavior has changed, I expect the fault of what you are seeing entirely lies with Apple.

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You are probably right. On imac play still launches music.app. On Mac Book Pro it does not. Guess we all still have to get used to that new software quality level from Apple.

After further testing on macbook discovered Plex Media Player has media control keys working fine. Could it be that the keys get “stuck” with that app? Play/Pause and forward backward all work fine in PMP.

When then opening Plexamp, they all work fine with that app. Closing plexamp and again opening PMP they again work fine there. They still do not work with music.app.

On a new test user account hte keys work as expected. So after all this feels like it is Plex related and the media keys not correctly being cleared or made available again after plexamp or PMP was used.

This happens on Windows as well. PlexAmp takes priority over other players. If I have PlexAmp running, but paused, and then play music in Spotify and then press on the play/pause button PlexAmp will resume playing and spotify will just keep running.

Ouch. I wonder if this is indeed a bug in chromium respectively electron.

10.15.3 installed and media keys working again as expected, at least for now.

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