Play/Pause keys not working

Have you ever had that issue on your Apple Mac where the play/pause keys seem to be temperamental. Most of the time they work perfectly playing and pausing the music on Spotify, iTunes or your preferred media player. But then, sometimes not at all. Obviously a restart resolves it… but it always comes back.

Yeah. Me to.

Turns out my issue has been down to Chrome. Well not specifically Chrome, instead the Google Play Music extension for Chrome. To upload music to the service you need to download the extension. But, what it appears to do is hijack the media keys whenever Chrome is open so that you can control the music playing through it.

I get what they’re trying to do, I just wish they only hijacked the keys when the browser tab was open rather than all the time.

Anyway, the fix is simple: disable (or remove completely) the extension when you’re not needing to upload music to Google Play Music.