Control windows audio player using hotkeys

Question

I am looking to control Windows Media Player, or any audio player for that matter, using hotkeys while typing in Microsoft Word (listening to recorded lectures and want to take a lot of notes, switching between apps is painful, as is using the mouse to drive the audio player). It seems that the hotkeys for WinAmp and WMP only work when the player has input focus. Ideally I also want to backup in 5 seconds increments, just like WinAmp.

Short of writing my own DLL hook to do this, is this possible using any existing players/utilities?

Answer 1

Winamp has global hotkey support. You may have to actually configure them to something reasonable, so that they won't conflict with other hotkeys, but they're there. Note that Winamp Lite doesn't support them (otherwise I'd show you a screenshot of the preferences right now), but every (or almost every) version of since 5.0 has had global hotkey support.

Answer 2

The Combiwave audio player supports global hotkeys as well and it's extremely easy to change to hotkeys for each file you want to play.