All of a sudden some of the function keys on my MacBook Pro don’t control iTunes any more. The volume keys work, but play/pause and track forward / track backward are both ignored. This is crazy-making as I have become quite accustomed to using them to control my listening. Is something in iTunes broken or what?
Nothing in iTunes is broken, I can start by telling you that. In fact, Apple iTunes doesn’t even have the ability to set or ignore function keys on your keyboard, whether you’re on a big iMac or a tiny MacBook Air. What’s most likely happened on your system is that you’ve run another program that wanted to use those specific keys on your keyboard — functions keys f7, f8 and f9 — for another purpose and they’ve overwritten their meaning to the operating system.
Again, nothing to panic about and the fix turns out to be surprisingly easy. In fact, it’s a single click repair job!
Start by going to the Apple menu on your system and choosing “System Preferences…”
Then choose “Keyboard”:
You can see it here, third from the left.
Choose that and a big window pops up:
You can see the needed check box above, but let’s zoom in a bit:
As you can see, it’s not checked, which is what you want. If you check this box, then other programs can redefine any or all of these helpful function keys to mean something else. Not good.
The fix is simply to ensure that the box adjacent to “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys” is not checked.
Done.
If that doesn’t work? Check to see if you’re running Microsoft Office as I’ve found those can monkey up the function keys…
Now when you use any of the function keys related to iTunes:
(as you can see, F7 is a shortcut for previous track, F8 alternates between play and pause, and F9 is next track, along with F10’s mute, F11’s volume down and F12’s volume up features)
You can still have all the controls show up in iTunes or in the iTunes mini window, as shown:
but now you don’t have to use them. Me? I am constantly listening to music, so F7-F12 are critical to my zen state! 🙂
Thank you so much. Your advice sorted the problem out for me. Many thanks!
here we are, 2017, OSX 10.13.1 and my media keys stopped working out of the blue. The ‘Use F1 . .. .’ box is unchecked. I even clicked on Restore Defaults, under the Shortcut menu, but nothing. I also followed the directions for typing in the shortcut. Nothing. I don’t have Chrome, and use Pages, not Office or Word, so I don’t think those could have hijacked the keys 🙁 Thanks for any input. I may have to phone apple care 😀
Yup. Google Play Music was my issue. Just unchecked the “enabled” box and keys started working again. Thanks!!!!
Hi DT!
I have the problem of the keyboard media keys (and volume keys) not working. Might be coincident with when I upgraded to macOS Sierra, but not sure.
I do NOT have Google Music or any other music extensions installed in Chrome, and Chrome’s keyboard settings shows no key mappings.
Worse, that Function Key checkbox DT mentions above seems to be gone in Sierra 🙁
Anyone have any idea how to fix the media keys??
Thanks!
Ugh, I found my problem.
First, I discovered that if I hold down the “fn” modifier key, pressing any of the F keys (media keys, volume, etc) all begin to work as they did before. So somehow the logic had become inverted.
However, without DT’s checkbox mentioned in this article, I didn’t know how to toggle it or fix it.
Then I found this article:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/313204-lost-function-key-functionality/
which linked to Karabiner Elements, and then it all came back to me…
I had recently installed Karabiner Elements to help fix the fact that Microsoft Remote Desktop assigns Cut/Copy/Paste to the wrong keys when remoting to Windows.
I ended up fixing the latter problem by getting MS RD BETA, which has support for fixing Cut/Copy/Paste. But I had still left Karabiner running….
I just went it to Karabiner->Devices and unchecked my keyboard, and instantly my media keys started wording right, without having to hold down “fn”.
Problem solved. Hope this helps someone else!
i tried the solution above and attempted to remove my extensions but it still didn’t work… is there any way i can fix this???
Remove what extensions? In what program?
Hi, I’ve got this exact problem (my f7,f8 and f9 don’t work as media control), but checking off that box does not fix the problem, in fact it makes it worse, so none of the standard function keys work, and f11 activates the desktop and f12 activates the dashboard. Any idea on how to fix this? Your article is the only one I’ve found to address this problem. I’m on Yosemite by the way.
After tons of debugging I actually isolated the problem to one of the extensions I’d installed in Google Chrome, Rowan. Try disabling them all and see if that helps with your f7, f8 and f9 problem. I am *very* happy to have the full functionality back, for sure.
Can confirm, the problem is Google Chrome’s Play/Music Manager extension. As soon as I removed that I regained key functionality.
many thanks guys !!
Dan, you’re a lifesaver 🙂
same for me with osx 10.10.4, chrome 44.0.2403.155 (ouch !!) and its extension Google Play Music 1.281.0.
as soon as I disabled this extension, my itunes play/pause/… keyboard shortcuts came back !!
😀
Same for me it was Google Play extension’s fault! Thanks for your help
Thank you. It was Plex app in Chrome Browser extension.
@Rowan – The fix is for the box to NOT be checked!
But if, as in my case that still doesn’t work, follow the last bit of advice and shutdown all Microsoft Office Apps. This worked for me!