Thinkpads Forum

I have a T42 with an external keyboard (some IBM-type with 'Rapid Access keys' on top, big blue 'Access IBM'-key as well as the keys for controlling media player, sound and 'Back'/'Forward'). I have succesfully remapped all the keys I want with the 'Keyboard Customizer' and the Hotkey driver.

What I was wondering is that is it at all possible for me to somehow map the controls for Window's Media Player to, say, Winamp? (I really, really, do not want to use Media Player and really, really, can't figure out to map the keys to control Winamp.)

You should be able to do so in Winamp itself. Under Preferences>Global Hotkeys, enable the use of Hotkeys and press the one you want bound to a particular action, Winamp should automatically catch the key events; then add it.

That should work, unless there is some serious software emulation going on with the external keyboard specifically for those rapid access hotkeys, more so than simply something like a hotkey poller or keyboard customizer, which I don't think is happening in this case.

See if that works; there is one other utility I know of that will let you generate a custom keyboard map and load it in windows, although that is much more involved.

Another piece of keyboard mapping software is KeyTweak (http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/). I've used it to get a Windows key on my T42. Might want to give that a try.

I could, of course, map some combo (eg. Alt+Shift+X for 'Play') but the thing is my external keyboard (the one from IBM) already has buttons for 'Play', 'Pause', 'Next', 'Previous', 'Stop', etc. They are just mapped to Window's Media Player...

I was wondering if there is an IBM (or ThinkVantage) software somewhere that could remap those keys to WinAmp (or BSPlayer, or whatever - just not Media Player)...

Is there no other way than to just dig deep into the Mighty Window's Registry somewhere...?