feature request: play Spotify when pressing Play/Pause key twice

[vegerot]

Thank you for this tool! I love that it opens Spotify when pressing the Play/Pause key.

One thing that I noticed is that if Spotify is closed, then pressing the Play/Pause key opens Spotify, but pressing it again does nothing.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Quit Spotify
2. Press Play/Pause key
3. (expect Spotify to open)
4. Press Play/Pause key again

Expected:
Spotify should start playing

Actual:
Nothing

Workaround:
After pressing the play/pause key for the first time, I can press Space to start playing

[galaxyrun]

This would be an amazing feature! @tombonez

[E3FxGaming]

Managed to get this to work on macOS Sequoia 15.4.1 by creating my own application that contains the desired Spotify logic.

1. Open Automator (Spotlight search for Automator.app)
2. When it asks you which type of document you want to create, choose "Application"
3. In the second column from the left, select "Run Shell Script"
4. On the right side under "Run Shell Script" paste

#!/bin/zsh
pgrep -x Spotify >/dev/null && osascript -e 'tell application "Spotify" to playpause' || open -a Spotify

Explanation: this script attempts to send the process ID of a running Spotify instance to /dev/null. If that works it knows Spotify is running and toggles the playback state. Otherwise it launches Spotify.

5. Save the application (File -> Save...) preferably to your /Applications for example as SpotifyPlay
6. Test that it works by closing Spotify, then in the menu bar of Automator select Workflow -> Play a couple of times. The first time you may get a permission request (in the background) that asks you whether you would allow Automator to control Spotify, which you should permit.
7. After you've confirmed that it works, close Spotify and Automator and test if it works if you launch the SpotifyPlay Application from Spotlight search
8. If that works too, you should be able to configure noTunes with

defaults write digital.twisted.noTunes replacement /Applications/SpotifyPlay.app

This approach is very flexible. Inside the shell script you can make it do anything. There are also other shell runners (e.g. for running Python scripts).

[elfstrob]

Wrote a slight improvement so that it starts playing automatically if Spotify is not open:

#!/bin/zsh if pgrep -x Spotify >/dev/null; then osascript -e 'tell application "Spotify" to playpause' else open -a Spotify while ! pgrep -x Spotify >/dev/null; do sleep 0.5 done sleep 2 osascript -e 'tell application "Spotify" to play' fi

Some may want to press play twice so they can select the right playlist, but I play the last thing I was listening to 90% of the time, so it saves me a button press.