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Comment by weavie | Hacker News Reader

It knows which device is currently playing. Anything you do sends it to the currently playing device. You can pull up a list of all connected devices and select which one you want to be playing. It then starts on the new device from where the old one left off.

It works really well. I have my raspberry pi plugged into my amplifier, and play through that. I control it with my phone or laptop, whichever is nearer.

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I think the question is about the media keys. What happens if your phone is playing something on Spotify, and your laptop is playing something on VLC, but also has Spotify open? Does pressing the skip media key make both players skip, or just one of them?

Ah interesting question.

This thread implies that there can be a war between apps fighting for control

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/Media-keys-....

I've never really used the media keys, so have no idea how it really works in practice. Might have a play when I get home later.

I think the media key interuption dispatching is handled by the OS and not the apps

As other replies pointed out, this is handled by the OS. Seems to work well most of the time for me on Ubuntu.

On Windows VLC will swallow hot keys if it's on top, otherwise they are caught by spotify. If they are both in the background it's spotify. If there's another app that listens to the same hot keys, I think (pretty confident) that it's the last one to register for the hot key.

On Windows hold shift then press the media keys to control a second (background) program. Found this out purely by accident in this exact scenario, VLC in foreground and Spotify in background!!!

Yeah it's actually really handy. I can send spotify to my chromecast from my phone, and as long as I have spotify open on my laptop, I can use the media keys to pause or skip.

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