How to enable or disable Chrome’s volume control and hardware media key management
Although it has not been widely released, Google introduced the ability to enable or disable hardware media keys with Chrome 75. By enabling a Chrome flag, you can determine whether Chrome’s volume control is affected by the volume keys on your keyboard.
There are a few situations where this can be very useful. For example, you can listen to music in the background while you work. When you adjust your sound settings in Chrome to turn off media keys, you can make sure your browser doesn’t hijack these attempts to turn up the volume.
You may also want the above behavior, but find that the volume control for Chrome is not working with your media keys. In such cases, you may need to enable media controls manually. We’ll show you how to do both in today’s tutorial with just a few clicks.
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How to enable Chrome volume control and hardware media key management
Google Chrome’s media controls enable setting can be toggled entirely in the browser without the need to change configuration files or install third-party extensions. Here’s how to turn it on so you can adjust Chrome’s volume with your keyboard:
- Open Chrome’s sound settings indicator
In your browser’s search bar, paste the following URL:
chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling
In Chrome flags, look for “Management of hardware multimedia keys”, which should be highlighted, and change the toggle next to “Default” or “Disabled” to “Enabled”.
- Enable the multimedia session service indicator
For Chrome’s volume control to work properly, the Media Session Service must also be enabled. This is another Chrome flag that you can access by pasting the following URL:
chrome://flags/#enable-media-session-service
Once you have changed the setting to “Enabled”, click on the big blue ” Revive “ button that appears at the bottom of your settings page. You can also close the browser manually.
How to turn off Chrome’s volume control and media key management
It’s even easier to turn off media keys in Chrome. This time, we only need to change one indicator, instead of two:
Look for Chrome flags for managing hardware media keys and turn them off
Paste the following URL into your browser bar to go directly to the appropriate Chrome sound settings:
chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling
Click the drop-down list next to “Management of hardware multimedia keys” and change to “Disabled”. Tap the big ” Revive “ button for the changes to take effect.
This short tutorial on Google Chrome volume control will hopefully save you a lot of frustration down the line. However, while playing around with the settings, you might want to turn off video autoplay and enable picture-in-picture mode for your browser.
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