# iTouch-Control plugin for Audacious

*2006-11-07*

> Control Audacious playback, skip tracks, and adjust volume with your keyboard’s multimedia keys using the iTouch-Control plugin.

iTouch-Control is a plugin for the Audacious media player that lets you control playback using your keyboard's multimedia keys. The idea for the plugin came to me after XMMS was removed from Gentoo's Portage tree.

[![Audacious with the iTouch-Control configuration and About dialogs open](/blog/itouch_control_plugin.png)](/blog/itouch_control_plugin.png)

*iTouch-Control 0.1.0 running with Audacious 1.2.1 on Gentoo.*

After years of using XMMS, I finally said goodbye and started looking for an alternative. Audacious was the replacement recommended in `/usr/portage/profiles/package.mask`. It closely resembled XMMS, but it was still missing some of its features and plugins.

One plugin I missed was `xmms-itouch`, which let me control the player using my multimedia keyboard. I decided to write a similar plugin for Audacious.

There were aspects of `xmms-itouch` that I didn't like, particularly its handling of all the keyboard's multimedia keys. I wanted my plugin to focus on controlling the media player, leaving other keys to general-purpose tools such as `hotkeys`.

With iTouch-Control, you can play, stop, skip to the next or previous track, mute the sound, and adjust the volume using your keyboard. To assign an action, click its **Grab** button in the configuration dialog and press the key you want to use. You can also enter the keycode manually.

The plugin was designed to work with multimedia keyboards supported by X.

Thanks to the XMMS team for their great software, and to the `xmms-itouch` developers for their work.

Downloads and project information are available on the [iTouch-Control SourceForge page](https://sourceforge.net/projects/itouch-control/).