Universal shortcuts for music players

Does anyone know if I could create universal short-cuts to perform certain actions? I used to have a keyboard with keys for play, pause, skip... that worked in any music player, but my new keyboard doesn't have that anymore. I could really use some global key short-cuts. If it can't be universal, specific ones for Spotify would work too. :-)

Solution 1:

Take a look at AutoHotKey. With it you can:

Create hotkeys for keyboard, joystick, and mouse. Virtually any key, button, or combination can become a hotkey.

Solution 2:

A program like SharpKeys can help you remap seldom used keys such as F12 etc. to media keys such as Play/Pause:

I've used it successfully with keyboards that lacked special media keys, and it worked fine.