I find that this can have one advantage over the classic media key support: I programmed my “Swiss knife” Windows PowerPro to generate “Ctrl-Alt-Right” on the mouse left click – right click “chord”, pressing left button and then pressing right. So now I can switch to the next track with simple clicks, without lifting my hand from mouse and even without additional buttons on mouse :)

songbird already has global hotkey support. if you can’t get it to work natively with your multimedia keys, either remap them to other keys, or just use a tiny hotkey app like HoeKey or Hotkey Master to do the extra work for you.

both those hotkey apps can also send winapi messages to apps like iTunes, letting you set global hotkeys for controlling them, too.

-=Ben=-