Spotify keyboard controls not working

Here is another link i have found that help me and its the same solutions as k2shah mention it, but with more details.

Instead of downloading the spotify_control, you use the D-Bus commands. Before you add it as a new keyboard command, feel free to execute those commands.

Play/Stop

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.PlayPause

Next

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Next

Previous

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Player.Previous

Once you validate the above commands, feel free to add them as Key Shortcut. For Ubuntu, "Settings > Devices > Keyboard" than add (+) and put the name and copy the commands, than put the keyboard shortcut.

TheLink

There is a simple solution credit goes to this thread on Spotify forum, Thanks to schuellerf and rszabla. The solution is pretty simple and works on any Linux distribution.

1. Download this file, extract it and make it executable chmod a+x spotify_control
2. Place it anywhere you want, I'll assume that it is placed in Downloads folder
3. Go to settings -> keyboard -> keyboard shortcuts -> custom shortcuts

4. Add new shortcut by clicking the plus button, I'll override the default play/pause/next and previous keys because I only listen to music on spotify, If you need those shortcuts then assign different ones for Spotify

The command you see in the picture above is for 'play/pause' function

/home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control playpause

The commands that are available

1. /home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control playpause
2. /home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control previous
3. /home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control next
4. /home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control play
5. /home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control stop

Please note that you have to do this

/home/your_username/Downloads/spotify_control playpause

Because

~/Downloads/spotify_control playpause

That won't work, at least not in Ubuntu 16.04, unity desktop, the shortcut manager doesn't seem to understand the tilde ~

The top-voted solutions are about adding a custom key mapping, which is kinda cumbersome, as you have to drop every other binding related to the Play/Pause key.
There's only one binding possible for a key so it means that your Play/Pause key stops working anywhere outside Spotify.

Initially, I wanted to do that, but Ubuntu settings didn't let me create a binding so the key was used/captured by something else on my system. It turned out that Chrome captures hardware media keys by default :)
You can disable this functionality by opening
chrome://flags/
and then disabling
Hardware Media Key Handling feature.

After doing so, your Play/Stop key along with Next and Previous keys are handled by Ubuntu itself again.
It fixed the issue for me. Now Spotify is the one to capture these keys.