Keyboard Play/Pause Music as Default

[J.A.K.]

I just transferred from an M2 MBA to an iMac M3. With the MBA, whenever I used the Play/Pause key, either on the MBA keyboard or a wireless Magic Keyboard, it always defaulted to affecting the Music program if I wasn't actively in another program with Play/Pause functionality. And even then, sometimes still defaulting to Music.

But now I can't even get it to work with Music at all. None of the settings I've tried seem to make any difference with the key one that I thought would affect it, the Function off/on option, only changing whether or not I get a system 'ding' when pressing play/pause or not (no ding with Function Key disabled, ding with it enabled).

So what's different in how the OS works between these two? Or what setting am I somehow missing that changes this functionality? I don't use any programs that would alter key functionality so I'm kinda at a loss as to why this suddenly works/doesn't work differently. The only other difference is that I was using a Magic Keyboard without TouchID and the one that came with the iMac has TouchID, but that seems an unlikely issue to be causing this.

 

[J.A.K.]

So, I think this may be a little bit bigger an issue than it at first seems.

After some investigation, it doesn't seem all that uncommon for starters. The culprit seems to be Music itself and probably related to iCloud backup/syncing. Given the recent issues with Apple Music, it could also be exacerbated by that although this particular problem goes back a couple of years at least.

I've also found that Music is currently being excluded from "Apps Using iCloud" list on all my devices. I'm positive it used to be one of the apps there although can't be entirely sure.

Regardless, ever since transferring to this iMac, two days ago, I've had this message popup in the Music application, "Loading Cloud Music Library..." at the bottom of the sidebar and "Loading Your Cloud Library. This may take several minutes." Apparently this may be what is preventing the play/pause key from working with the app. The key works to launch the Music app, but doesn't play or pause anything (in the Music application, works in others like Safari and Firefox).

I'm also having a helluva time with syncing my songs. I keep getting authorisation blocks to play songs and having to reauthorise my computer, even though it's been reauthorised for those songs. I deauthorised every computer and reauthorised just this one but even that didn't fix it and I can only deauthorise once a year, for some bizarre reason.

I'm probably going to try an erase and reinstall from a Time Machine backup next as this seems like a larger issue than just non-functional play/pause in Music.

 

[J.A.K.]

Nothing is working. Music is still 'Loading your Cloud Library. This may take several minutes." And now I've added Cloud and Cloud Status columns to the song list, I can see they're all "Waiting." On what or whom I haven't the foggiest.

I've deleted all plists, deleted all playlists, deleted all 'songs' from the Music app, even deleted the files on drive, all associated Library files for Music and iTunes, and readded both manually (and then redeleted everything again) and through Cloud download (which is odd 'cause they do download, making this whole waiting on the Cloud thing confusing), and yet still I have these issues.

What's even weirder is that I don't have any issues on my other devices. Just the M3 iMac.

And Apple support were useless, as per usual. They managed to, after being tossed around between six different people requiring six rehashings of the problems, then hang up on me and blame me for not answering their calls.

This isn't an uncommon issue, either, judging from the amount of Apple support community discussions, all of which get the same doggedly, "IT'S A PEBKAC ISSUE STUPIDS!" responses from both community support people and Apple themselves.

So I guess I just now have to live with never being able to use a pretty key function of the computer, i.e. the play/pause button, and remain forever in a Cloud Status limbo.