SUMMARY The active media player, which can be interacted with by pressing play/pause on the keyboard, can't be manually selected when there are multiple media players open, and sometimes, an inactive media player will steal that spot, making it impossible to use play/pause on the keyboard to control the actual media player in use. I have noticed this behavior when listening to music on Spotify, then listening to an audio message on WhatsApp Web on the browser. Before listening to the audio message, all is well, and my keyboard media controls successfully control Spotify. But as soon as I listen to the audio message on WhatsApp Web, that becomes the active media player, and it remains as such indefinitely, with no way to set Spotify back as the active media player, so after listening to the audio message, my keyboard media controls stop working. It'd be great to be able to select Spotify back as the active media player through the Media Player Controls panel. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Launch a media player (MP A) (like Spotify) 2. Start playing music 3. Press play/pause on the keyboard 4. Notice how it controls MP A 5. Open the Media Player panel (Media Player Controls) 6. Notice that MP A is the one with the star, the active one 7. Pause MP A 8. Open another media player (MP B) (like listening to an audio message on WhatsApp Web) 9. Notice that now, MP B is the "active" one, the one with a star in the Media Player panel 10. Resume playing on MP A 11. Press play/pause on the keyboard 12. Notice that now nothing happens, MP B is still the "active" media player 13. Open the Media Player panel, and go to the tab for MP A 14. Notice that while on that tab, you can hit play/pause, but the key on the keyboard still does nothing 15. Notice that it's impossible to select MP A as the active media player OBSERVED RESULT MP B remains the active media player indefinitely, with no way to manually set MP A as the active media player. EXPECTED RESULT There should be a button, like a star button, on the Media Player Controls panel, to allow the user to manually select which media player is the active one. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Manjaro Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.91.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.15.25-1-MANJARO (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 4 × AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with Radeon Vega Graphics Memory: 7.7 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970/PCIe/SSE2 By the way, I'm not sure if this fits as a bug report, but I'm extremely confused as to where this kind of thing should go, so I'm posting it here. If this is not the place for it, please inform me, and I'll gladly repost it on the correct place.
Created attachment 147438 [details] GIF showing me fighting with the Media Player Controls panel
I would add that sometimes the active media player is not at all controllable with the keyboard media buttons. Usually happens to Spotify. When I click on the media player in the system tray, spotify is not even one of the players detected. Only sometimes it fixes itself if I restart spotify. This problem usually happens after waking up from suspend, while before suspend everything has been working flawlessly.
I have the same problem with Firefox (plasma-browser-integration) and VLC. Playing just one tiny sound in Firefox and I can't control VLC by keyboard anymore. It would really be nice to have a smarter algorithm to select the active media player, or at least to let the user make a permanent decision.
It all works for me. When this happens, is the play or pause button in the Media Player widget grayed out, by any chance?
It's a tricky bug and for now it looks like it depends a lot on chance. I tried the combination with Youtube + VLC, and that work flawlessly for my tests today (failed before too). But Soundcloud + VLC with various pause/resumes gets the widget in several incorrect states. It could be that it works better when the widget is pinned, at least it *feels* like it. Problems that I found, but couldn't reproduce every time: Problem 1: Step 1: VLC playing, Soundcloud playing → Soundcloud selected as main, playing ✓ Step 2: VLC playing, Soundcloud paused → Soundcloud selected as main not playing, VLC shown as not playing Step 3: Close the Soundcloud tab in FF, VLC still playing → main: "No media playing", I can still control VLC through its tab inside the widget, but the widget's main tab refuses to acknowledge VLC Restart of VLC fixed it. Problem 2: Step1: VLC playing, Soundcloud playing → Soundcloud selected ✓ Step2: VLC playing, Soundcloud paused → VLC gets selected ✓ but pause button is grayed out. Problem 3: Step1: Click inside Dolphin on media file, VLC starts, plays → is shown inside widget Step2: Instead, open VLC manually, open file inside VLC (drag from Dolphin), click play → is not shown inside widget My guess is that there are some events transmitted between media player and widget that get lost *some* times. If only one event is lost, the media widget gets in an invalid state that it can't recover from.
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[Sorry, didn't know that I had to update the status]
The logic has been improved in Plasma 6. Please reopen this bug if it's not fixed.