Play/Pause and stop media keys not working

Anonymous
2022-01-24T02:02:23+00:00

Hi everyone,

So I've got a weird problem, and I haven't found anyone else with the same issue.

For some reason the play/pause and stop media keys on my keyboard (K55) aren't working. If I test it on keyboardchecker.com it says MediaPlayPause and MediaStop, so the keys itself do work. I've tried it with both Spotify and VLC, and it they not do anything. Other keys like previous track, next track and volume controls work fine. It's just the play/pause and stop keys that don't work. Nothing happens.

Anybody got any clue as to what's going wrong here?

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Input and language

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-06-15T20:47:55+00:00

    Having the same issue described, and having the button work properly if I hold the Windows key, after seeing some answers about VoIP applications I decided to check for apps. Apparently, RingCentral (Zoom-like/teams app) has a phone function, I closed the app and started it back again. Now everything is working. It seems some of these VoIP apps might be hijacking the play/pause button when a call comes in, and restarting the app/restarting the machine fixes the problem for the most part ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  2. Anonymous
    2022-04-17T22:23:21+00:00

    Yeah my problem was identical. Just restart the computer, it worked for me.

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  3. Anonymous
    2022-04-17T22:22:30+00:00

    I just shut down and restarted and it worked fine after.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-03-17T19:58:29+00:00

    My mind is entirely blow. I had this issue. Media Previous/Next and everything else worked for me. Media Play/Pause did not work. Holding Windows key and pressing Media Play/Pause worked fine (very surprising). Turns out closing 3cx desktop app (the electron one) fixed it. Even after reopening 3cx the issue hasn't come back. I assume it'll come back after receiving a call (mentioned by @KyleNabors ). I'm going to try using the PWA for 3cx instead of the electron app.

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  5. Anonymous
    2022-03-07T19:55:29+00:00

    Similarly, mine seems to have been caused by 3cx (VoIP application). Oddly though, once I opened the app back up, the problem didn't return until I received another call.

    Wonder if it's an issue with any non-Microsoft calling software? MS Teams doesn't seem to cause this trouble for me.

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