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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
    2022-04-17T22:23:21+00:00

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

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  2. 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)_/¯

    8 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2022-08-22T07:02:16+00:00

    I was also facing the issue while streaming hulu. Play pause button was not working and the browser was crashing while streaming. By the help of this post I found that clearing the cache can help. After clearing chrome cache the issue is resolved for me now.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-10-14T18:21:53+00:00

    Similarly to others, Win + Play/Pause worked for me. Very strange.

    In my case, MS Teams was the issue. My best guess is it got hooked on a gif or some other element. Restarting Teams fixed it for me.

    57 people found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2022-10-18T08:45:56+00:00

    I just discovered (via this thread) that this problem is caused by Teams for me: I had the problem just now; stopping Teams make play/pause work again; and starting Teams again didn't make it come back.

    And I'll see whether the incorrect behavior comes back after receiving an incoming call in Teams.

    (And it is good to know the Win+Play/Pause workaround works.)

    36 people found this answer helpful.
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