Volume control keyboard shortcuts not working in 14.04?

Solution 1:

I found a bug report on launchpad regarding this issue and it seems when reassigning the media keys some prefix is missing. The following lines are somewhat of a summary of what is discussed in bug report

You can issue the following command to see your current keybinding:

gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up

Output should be XF86AudioRaiseVolume but when I use system setting's GUI and check I find it's value to be AudioRaiseVolume.

You can either reset them via either:

gsettings reset org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up

or

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up "XF86AudioRaiseVolume"

Of course the latter is more specific and might not work with all systems out there but I I was happy to find out it's just the string XF86 missing so e.g. I could bind terminal to calculator media key:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys terminal "XF86Calculator"

For a list of possible keys to map you can use

 gsettings list-keys org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys

play is actually play/pause !

If your setup is different you might want to figure out your media key's name and set it via dconf. I haven't done it myself but it is mentioned in a comment which in turns links back to another askubuntu-question: Where are GNOME keyboard shortcuts stored?.

Edit: Couldn't help but to play around with it a little bit and as my keyboard is lacking some Previous/Next buttons I found CTRL+Volume-Down/CTRL+Volume-Up useful:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys previous "<Primary>XF86AudioLowerVolume"
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys next "<Primary>XF86AudioRaiseVolume"