If you use YouTube Music or similar music apps, you may have noticed there’s no built-in global media control, especially for play/pause shortcuts, and there’s nothing worse than having to find the app when somebody is calling you to pause it quickly.
Fortunately, there’s a clean and efficient way to solve this using the playerctl tool. In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up a global keyboard shortcut to control YouTube Music playback on Linux Mint, although the same steps will apply to all common music players and Linux distros.
Step 1 – Install playerctl
First, ensure playerctl is installed. This utility allows you to control media players that support MPRIS.
sudo apt install playerctl
Step 2 – Launch YouTube Music
Open YouTube Music or your music player of choice. Start playing a track to activate the media session and to give us something to hook into.
Step 3 – Verify It Works
Test playerctl in the terminal –
playerctl play-pause
If YouTube Music pauses or resumes playback, you’re good to go on the next step.
You can also optionally limit which app you’re targetting by running the playerctl -l command in the terminal to list all active apps that you can target, then appending the name to the end of the player ctl command like this –
playerctl -p edge.YoutubeMusic play-pause
Step 4 – Create a Custom Keyboard Shortcut
- Open System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Custom Shortcuts
- Click Add custom shortcut.
- Name: Toggle YouTube Music
- Command:
playerctl play-pause
- Click the unassigned shortcut column and press your preferred key combo (e.g.,
Ctrl + Enter).
Further Steps
From here it’s really easy to also set up other commands, ones I’d suggest are shortcuts to skip and to go to the previous track. I personally have these linked to CTRL + Plus and CTRL + Minus –
playerctl previous
playerctl next
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
play | Command the player to play. |
pause | Command the player to pause |
play-pause | Command the player to toggle between play/pause. |
stop | Command the player to stop. |
next | Command the player to skip to the next track. |
previous | Command the player to skip to the previous track. |
position [OFFSET][+/-] | Command the player to go to the position or seek forward or backward OFFSET in seconds. |
volume [LEVEL][+/-] | Print or set the volume to LEVEL from 0.0 to 1.0. |
status | Get the play status of the player. Either “Playing”, “Paused”, or “Stopped”. |
metadata [KEY...] | Print the metadata for the current track. If KEY is passed, print only those values from the metadata. |
open [URI] | Command for the player to open a given URI. Can be either a file path or a remote URL. |
loop [STATUS] | Print or set the loop status. Either “None”, “Track”, or “Playlist”. |
shuffle [STATUS] | Print or set the shuffle status. Either “On”, “Off”. |
Big thanks to the playerctl project found on GitHub and the many contributors who made this really simple to do – https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl
Sysadmin Central 
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