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KeyControl

October 1st, 2006 by Paul Mah
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KeyControl
is
an extremely
configurable Winamp hotkey plugin KeyControl is an extremely configurable Winamp hotkey plugin that makes it possible to access Winamp and control it through your own system-wide hotkeys. Standard functions such as Play, stop, skip track, fast forward are all supported. There are also more interesting ones such as system volume control, switching skin and even single-play PGM (Repeating your favorite song at the touch of a hotkey).

Even though it was initially released way back in 2001, its ability to create hotkeys using the standard ALT-CTRL-SHIFT as well as the WIN-key as modifiers remains unsurpassed. In terms of features, it is still the bestIn terms of features, it is still the best

Not only that, you can combine these modifiers not only with the standard keyboard keys but also with the SCROLL WHEEL or the MOUSE BUTTONS of your computer mouse to form the most unique hotkeys. This is something not found in ANY other hotkey plug-ins, including the default one bundled in recent versions of Winamp!

Maximize your keyboard keys so that you can play your favorite FPS or MMORPG games completely unhindered. Give it a try today!

Yes, I wrote KeyControl using C and native Win32 APIs. You can download it here

I do customization of KeyControl to your requirements as well. You can request it by contacting me. Assuming it is not too complicated, I will do it without charge. However, if you like KeyControl, you can also show your support via PayPal.

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KeyControl

(pull) KeyControl is an extremely configurable Win...

35 Responses to “KeyControl”

on 02 Nov 2006 at 4:11 pm Anonymous

Hey yo’re a genius!! You won’t belive how many of these “control your winamp with your keyboard” like programs i tested. This one is the ONLY one that really does what it says! GREAT!

but i’ve got an idea to improve your code a little. I’ve got a “PLAY/PAUSE” button on my keyboard. it would be nice if you could make it play / pause winamp (dependiing on if its playing or not).

Thanks for sharing your plugin!
on 05 Nov 2006 at 7:05 pm Paul Mah

Are you able to assign it to KeyControl in the configuration panel? I use a rather low-level method to capture the keypresses - it should be able to capture just about any keycode. If it doesn’t show up; the likelihood is that you will need to install the keyboard vendor’s driver first.
on 21 Nov 2006 at 3:51 pm Anonymous

Hey. It would be very nice to be able to set a key up to Restore/Minimize Winamp, or two keys, or whatever. But this plug-in is incredible. If I get some money I may just donate!
on 21 Nov 2006 at 3:53 pm Anonymous

Oh, and by the way, get a download button on this page–it took me five minutes to find the link. I’m supposed to read?
on 21 Nov 2006 at 5:47 pm Paul Mah

Thanks for your feedback. Good idea on getting a more visible graphical button for downloading.

The option to hide/restore Winamp as an “Action” that you can assign to hotkeys has already been added into KeyControl more than 3 years ago.
on 22 Nov 2006 at 6:08 pm Patrick D

Thanks for the great plugin! I find it far superior to the included global hotkey implementation.

I was thinking the plugin could be improved if when selecting actions, there’d be an action that could execute a string via the command line. The string being inputed when the action is selected from the list.

(this would be particularly useful for use with other winamp plugins that allow winamp to be controlled from the command line, plus add a lot of other functionality to the program)

Also, I was wondering if you are willing to give out the source for this plugin.

Thank you for your time.
on 22 Nov 2006 at 6:42 pm Paul Mah

Patrick,

What are the command-line plugins that you have in mind? The biggest issue to adding such a feature really is not the difficulty of implementing itself - it is quite trivial to put it in.

The problem comes when designing or should I say, re-designing a UI that accomodates the configuration of this feature intuitively… It might help if you can point me to some of these plugins or elaborate more on what can be achieved with it..
on 23 Nov 2006 at 7:15 pm Andy Winkler

hi, the pluggin is great. Is it possible to make all or some of the hotkeys not systemwide, but only if winamp is the selected window. Because I want to have the space key to play/pause, but don’t want this function when I use the space key in an other programm.
This would be wonderful, thanks
on 24 Nov 2006 at 6:49 pm Patrick D

Paul,

The features I was interested in using involved loading of playlists, saving playlists, etc.

Here are links to the plugins I was refering to.
http://membres.lycos.fr/clamp/
http://www.geocities.com/wplugins/
on 24 Nov 2006 at 7:22 pm Paul Mah

Andy, what you suggested seems like an interesting idea. Let me ponder on it some…

Patrick, I looked through the plugins briefly, and they don’t seem to be very exceptional (in the abililities of the plugins)

What exactly would you like to do with your playlist? Perhaps a direct implementation in KeyControl would be esaier/more elegant.
on 25 Nov 2006 at 5:29 am Martin

Hi!
I have missed a short-cut keycombo for “move after current” when I have a song selected in my playlist. It seems there is no way to get this function as a key command. Any clues as to get this working? Its a bother to have to press F3 and find every song I want to move.

Thanks in advance!
on 25 Nov 2006 at 2:54 pm Paul Mah

Martin,

Why do you have to press F3 to “move on” to the next song? If you like listening to repeat play certain (of your favourite) songs on your playlist, you can use the “PGM Set” and “PGM Unset” action. I personally bind it to “+” and “-” on the numeric keypad respectively.

When I come across a song I want to repeat, I just press “+”. My Winamp settings are set to repeat; hence the same song will repeat until I tire, at which I will press “-” to “release” this song and move on to the next song on my playlist…
on 26 Nov 2006 at 10:30 pm Martin

Oh, I think I was a little unclear. I’ll try to explain more thouroughly.
I have my playlist up and running and a couple thousand songs loaded, at the moment I might be listening to song nr 401 in the list. While I am browsing the list I find that I want song 1548 to play after 401. So I use the “move after current” command and put song 1548 on the 402nd place in the list.
To do this I have to push F3 in the playlist, type in the name of song 1548 and right click and chose “move after current”.

Since I do this a lot, it would be so wonderful, just having to mark song 1548 in the list and perhaps press ctrl + alt + a or something to directly add it after song 401 without and F3 searching.

Hope this was more informative as to my question.

Martin
on 27 Nov 2006 at 11:45 pm Patrick D

(I seem to have linked to the wrong plugin for one of those, sorry) I only meant to include the CLAMP link and a link to a similar program.

To keep this message short,
Here are some ideas that could greatly improve your program

A simple one: open the jump to file box
One that requires a change in interface

One requiring some kind of popup input:
An open file (selected when command is added) command

The most useful thing you could implement from my stand point is a key that performs an invisible jump to operation.

A hotkey is pressed and then the user types in the letters of whatever he is looking to play in his playlist and when he presses enter it plays the first match, and if he presses esc then it cancels the operation and does nothing. During this time it all key presses would be “gobbled” as you say. Then the person could play specific songs without needing to return his desktop so long as he knows what he wants.

I understand the challenges presented with the last function, but i believe it would be relatively easy to explain and intuitive to use.

If you have a constraint on time, I’d be willing to offer my time on that function.

I’m a junior in comp sci and math. I can write in C and I’m familiar with the win32 api particularly involving user interface with some experience using the keyboard input api.
on 29 Nov 2006 at 5:23 am Martin

Hi Paul,
very helpful tool, but skin switching does not work properly on my system. It switches only once to the First skin in the list (Winamp classic). Any idea?

Martin
on 29 Nov 2006 at 7:44 am Paul Mah

Martin,

What happens after the first skin? How many skins do you have install on your system?
on 06 Dec 2006 at 9:49 am David

Hey this is a great plugin. I only have one suggestion and it is much like the first suggestion give. I too have a play pause button. Is there a way to allow the button to toggle play and pause? like mute does with unmute. I can register the key to play but it ony does that. i wish it would play and if pressed again, pause.
on 12 Dec 2006 at 10:32 am Leo

I really miss one function. Since I’m such a lazy ass user and like to kick back infront of my PC without having a hand on the keyboard I always wanted a function that would let me to have a mouse only hotkey. For example a LEFTCLICK + SCROLLDOWN for the next track function. Or LEFTCLICK + MIDDLECLICK for play/pause. A mouseonly alternative for changing the volume level would be nice too.

A hotkey like that would make my day.
on 13 Dec 2006 at 6:14 pm Paul Mah

Mute and unmute functionality has already been added to KeyControl. Not yet gone round to packaging it up and releasing an incremental upgrade though.

An all-mouse solution should be possible, probably can add in button #4 and #5 button control as well. Will it be popular…?
on 18 Feb 2007 at 5:04 pm Ponpat

Current version of winamp global hotkeys does not support toggle on/off repeat TRACK currently playing, so your Set/Unset PGM is really handy. Great work. Thanks!

Would it be possible / difficult to bring up the file info dialog of the track currently playing? (I have a habit of editing file TAG frequently, right now I have to switch to winamp and hit ALT+3, would be nice if I could press some key and bring up the file info of the track being played instantly.) Just a thought.

Again, thanks!
on 02 Mar 2007 at 6:05 am Stoffer

It would be great if you could bind a key to jump to a file in your playlist
I dont seem to find that action

Great plugin!
on 20 Mar 2007 at 9:20 pm Ricsi

Hi there!

Thanks for the great plugin!!

I’ve got only two issues:

First, could you speed up the volume change?
Currently it’s about half as fast as the builtin volume change (aprox 4sec end-to-end).
(Winamp 2.81 - don’t like fancy new ones)
Or maybe make it configurable in the ini file

Second, when using a modifier key (eg CTRL), you’ve to re-press/hold it also, if you want to make multiple actions.
For example multiple NextTrack actions, or Next than Prev (changed your mind )
It would be nice, if you didn’t need to repress the modifier key, only the normal one, while holding the mod key.

Thanks a lot for any help!
on 23 Apr 2007 at 5:15 am Duggis

Hi. I just would like to thank you for some great piece of work!
I just got a small suggestion. The actions Set Shuffle and Unset Shuffle, might it be able for you to merge them into the action Toggle Shuffle? Would spare me one of my buttons :p

Thanks again!
on 07 Jun 2007 at 2:47 am Luftschiff

Hey,

The Plug-in doesn’t seem to be working for me..
At least not entirely.

The Volume Up, Volume Down and the show/hide winamp keys don’t work the ways they are supposed to or don’t work at all ( volume up doesnt work at all, volume down lowers it to 40 % and then mutes it and show/hide shows it but doesnt hide it anymore..

Thanks for the help
on 03 Jul 2007 at 12:06 am » Intel is working on anti-cheat technology | Tech News | TechRepublic.com

[…] that reads or writes to the keyboard or mouse queue. I wrote a hotkey plug-in for Winamp last year (Winamp KeyControl), and I can just see how this anti-cheat implementation will scream murder at every other key […]
on 30 Jul 2007 at 4:49 am » A mouse that fits into your ExpressCard slot | IT News Digest | TechRepublic.com

[…] Anyway, Newton Peripheral has kindly agreed to send out a set for me to review. Hopefully, it’ll be the MuGo Mouse X54 so that I can test it out with my KeyControl hotkey plugin for Winamp. […]
on 10 Aug 2007 at 9:24 pm Andrew

Anonymous Posted: “I’ve got a “PLAY/PAUSE” button on my keyboard. it would be nice if you could make it play / pause winamp (dependiing on if its playing or not).”

The feature to do that is listed as “PAUSE” in the list of commands. I was pleased to figure this out after messing around with it for a couple of minutes.

Suggestion: Maybe re-naming that one or just adding one that says “play/pause” and have it do the same thing as “pause” would be easy enough i imagine.
on 18 Oct 2007 at 11:07 am Ryan

Awesome plug-in, solved the vista/winamp 5.5 bug with registering media keys. However I had the same confusion as Andrew looking for a play/pause action. Might be nice to rename pause to play/pause. Thank you for your work Paul!
on 15 Dec 2007 at 5:29 pm trev

thanks so much for this plugin! it’s fantastic, i am so happy to have a decent global hotkey function for winamp 2.95! i can finally delete winamp 5 for good.

as the people above have mentioned, it took me a while to figure out that “pause” = “play/pause”.

on the same idea though, i really like the idea of toggle keys for global hotkeys. i would love it if you could introduce options for these functions to have toggle versions using the one hotkey shortcut:

repeat all - on/off (normal repeat)
repeat one - on/off (PGM repeat)
shuffle - on/off
CDROM tray - open/close

also not sure if it’s just me, but when i hit mute/unmute, a white box with black text reading “Testing” appears on my screen until i refresh my display.

all in all a great plugin, i hope you continue to improve it too. thanks a lot.
on 03 Jan 2008 at 7:31 pm JJaska

Would it be possible to add “rate 1″, “rate 2″ and so on to KeyControl?
Would be nice to be able to rate unrated songs without touching the mouse.
PS. great plugin!
on 14 Jan 2008 at 9:27 am laura

Thanks for the great plugin.
I would like to suggest a new action
I would like a hotkey to set stop after current song.
on 19 Jan 2008 at 1:09 am nmxnmx

Hi,

Thanks for this great plug-in.

I would like to suggest another new action:

- Open the dialog box: Jump to song…
on 27 Jan 2008 at 3:33 pm Ben

Very, very well done. I’ve tried many plugins before this, none of them supports the media buttons found on my keyboard. This does.

Great job!
on 07 Feb 2008 at 12:23 pm John L. Galt

Paul,

Thanks for this wonderful addition to WinAmp that allows me to fully use my M$ KB with Fingerprint Reader’s multimedia keys as they were meant to be used.

on 10 Aug 2007 at 9:24 pm Andrew made a post above showing how to make the Play/Pause button work correctly, and I am happy to say it seems to be working as expected.
on 08 Mar 2008 at 7:07 am Arya

Paul,

I know the pause feature plays/pauses winamp if a song is already playing, but it won’t play it if the track is stopped. If you could fix this, everything would be perfect.