Last.fm Global Hotkeys
Last.fm doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for global hotkeys, which I think are a requirement for any music player. So I created a simple tool that will let you control the Last.fm for Windows app through global hotkeys.
Features
- Hotkeys for Skip, Love, Ban, Tag, Share and Add to playlist. Plus a buggy hotkey for Play/Stop, too 🙂
- Define your own key combinations.
- Minimize to system tray.
- Supports autorun.
- Portable. Settings will be saved in lastfm_hotkeys.ini in the program’s folder. If the .ini file is not found settings will be saved in the registry.
- Screenshot.
Download
lastfm_global_hotkeys.zip (559 KB)
I’ve only tested the application with Last.fm player 1.5.2.38918 on Windows XP. I have no idea whether it’ll work with other versions. Use at your own risk.
Known Issues
For some inexplicable reason the “Play/Stop” button in Last.fm behaves differently than the other buttons when I try to click it programmaticaly. Sometimes it gets stuck in disabled (grayed out) mode. I wasted two days trying to figure it out and got nowhere, so I’ve decided to leave it unfixed for now.
<rant>The Last.fm app uses the Qt framework which makes it very hard to control it externally. Things that look like buttons aren’t really buttons from the Windows API point of view, etc. Maybe an extension DLL would be a better solution, but I currently don’t feel like plodding through the Last.fm source code to figure out how to make an extension. Maybe someday.</rant>
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This is really great. Thanks for your great work.
I found a small bug when using under vista sp1 (UAC disabled).
when toggle “load on startup” all hotkeys stop function.
Okay, fixed that. I’m uploading the new ZIP now.
really fast reply.
thanks for your work again 🙂
don´t work for me… when I use a shortcut, I just listen to a beep and nothing works 🙁
Well, this app isn’t really anywhere near bug-free 😛 All I can suggest is restarting both Last.fm and this program, might help sometimes.
Hi, I do this… and just start working 🙂 Don´t know why… but now works…
If you accept some requests… Well… Maybe a mute hotkey… and control with the global hotkeys (like play, stop, skip, etc… some keyboards have this..) will be amazing!!
Sorry for the english!
Probably can’t do a mute hotkey because the “mute” icon in the player isn’t really a button, just a part of the “volume control” component. Might be hard to hit it programmatically.
As for media keys (I think that’s what they are called) on certain keyboards, I would support them if I could… But there’s no documented way to access them in the programming language that I used. It probably can be done (in theory), but I don’t know how.
I don´t know how do you access the buttons…. but maybe you find some useful information about the media buttons (or any other acces to buttons) with the AutoHotkey software… there is a interesting post on last.fm forum: http://www.lastfm.com.br/user/andymantell/journal/2006/09/01/3ak1_use_your_media_keyboard_buttons_with_the_last.fm_player%21#shoutbox
I try this… but don´t work for me…. But maybe you understand better how to make it work.
Finally looked at the link. The approach described in there would probably work, but it would cause the Last.FM window to activate & deactivate every time you pressed a hotkey. I think that would be annoying and would cause problems with fullscreen applications (i.e. games).
Excellent, thank you for this useful utility. I can now use my phone to control the Last.fm player, as I have been doing with Winamp.
I’ve been looking for something like this since I started using Last.fm. I use Winamp to play music and I’m too much used to using global hotkeys, so I missed them a lot when using the Last.fm client. This app works perfectly fine!! Even the “buggy” play hotkey 😉 Thanks a lot!!
Thanks for this great app. I listen to a lot of music at work and this give me a perfect way to quickly apply the ‘love’ tag to a song.
works with windows 7 beta 7057 x64 😀
nice app m8, thx a lot
Awsome! Thanks a lot, I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages.
Thanks a ton! I have been looking for this solution for quite some time.
it’s not working for me on win7 x64 :/
I still don’t have Win 7, so there’s really not much I can do about that.
Awesome mate good work. Works like a charm in Win7 64bit RC1
You >= awesome! I’ve been looking EVERYWHERE for this, and finally typed the right thing into Google and found it. This was exactly what I was looking for. Fantastic.
http://ewadim.blogspot.com/2010/08/lfmhotkey.html