Multimedia Keys in Ubuntu

I recently moved from Rhythmbox to amaroK and I was soon to find out that my multimedia keys were no longer working, specifically the “Start media player” button which insisted on starting Rhythmbox. Some dude even posted the following:

I did a lot of searching for this one as it was driving me crazy, eventually I found where it was defined, it’s hardcoded into Gnome:
Code:
case MUSIC_KEY:
execute ("rhythmbox", FALSE);
break;

This leaves you with four options […] Use a third party program such as xbindkeys to do the job.[…]

Yup, xbindkeys did it.

1. Download and install xbindkeys and xbindkeys-config (a GTK frontend for xbindkeys)
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys-config

2. Create the default xbindkeys config file (xbindkeys-config crashed for me, I guess this was the problem)
xbindkeys --defaults > /home/claudius/.xbindkeysrc

3. Run xbindkeys-config, maybe remove the settings already there, define a new key and assign it to open your fave app.

Yay yay amaroK! The Ubuntu family is nice.