Banshee fails to respond to media shortcut keys.

[Vernon Cole]

On my laptop, as on most new computers, there are keyboard keys for "volume up" "volume down" and "mute". (Some even have play, pause, etc.) Those keys are ineffective on banshee. What should be a simple one-button operation becomes a round of fiddling with the mouse. I assume that the "volume up" and "volume down" buttons on my Logitech USB headphones use the same interface -- since they don't work either.
  C'mon -- if Windows Media Player can do it, so can you.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: banshee 2.1.3-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-10.16-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-10-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.22.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Sep 13 09:27:48 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110426)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: banshee
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-06 (7 days ago)

[Eduardo (ludentico)]

I think it is not associated to Banshee. I experience the same bug on Oneiric, but I uninstalled Banshee and use instead Clementine. As I press a multimedia key (not volume), there shows a prohibition sign (see attachment).

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

On 20/10/2011 02:17, Eduardo wrote:
> I think it is not associated to Banshee. I experience the same bug on
> Oneiric, but I uninstalled Banshee and use instead Clementine. As I
> press a multimedia key (not volume), there shows a prohibition sign (see
> attachment).

How media players listen for media keys in Ubuntu (GNOME interface) is done
something like this:-

X11 Keyboard event → gnome-settings-daemon → Media players (e.g. Banshee).

This bug has two problems mentioned, but since Vernon came first, Eduardo should
file a new bug.

1) Vernon's issue (the main issue of this bug):
Something's obviously going wrong between X11 Keyboard event and
gnome-settings-daemon, or something before X11 Keyboard event.

On most machines, including all the laptops I have tested, and all of the
keyboards I own that have media keys, these work out of the box. In the event
that they don't, two things could have happened:-

a) Your keyboard is misconfigured and emitting the wrong X11 key events. You can
work around this by configuring the shortcuts for volume control and other media
keys under System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Sound and Media.
Incidentally, you can use any unused keybinding for this, not just the media keys.

b) Your keyboard is just just plain weird and is doing something non-standard,
so no X11 events appear when your media keys are pressed. This is probably
pretty unlikely

As for your USB headphones, unless they're emulating a keyboard for volume
up/down, which they probably aren't, that's an unrelated issue, which probably
requires some more specific drivers for this. I would expect that headphones
would control their own volume independent of the OS though.

2) Eduardo's issue:
The prohibition sign shows that there is no media player registered with
gnome-settings-daemon. When Banshee or another media player is not started, the
logo appears. When Banshee has started, the media keys work.

For the media keys to work, you'll need to make sure the Multimedia Keys
extension is enabled in Banshee (which registers against gnome-settings-daemon).
It's enabled by default, but it would be nice to make sure.

In case #1, this is not a problem in Banshee, so I'm reassigning this bug to
gnome-settings-daemon.

  affects ubuntu/banshee
  status invalid

  affects ubuntu/gnome-settings-daemon
  status new

Case #2 should go into a new bug report, if it really turns out to be a bug. I
don't think it is, though.

--
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

is that still an issue?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]