[antoineMoPa]

There are multiple different sources that the user might want to start playing. Browser tab A/B/C (example: web radios), a music application or music service website in a tab that's not even opened yet (eg: spotify), the last video tab they opened (ex: youtube).

Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO. If nothing was paused, it should do nothing. Else, you open a pandora's box of possibly wrong choices that the user then has to close.

[parl_match]

> Whatever is the last thing that was paused should play IMHO

That's currently how it works.

This is purely an issue and complaint for when nothing at all was playing or open, and an app hasn't currently registered a handler.

If you land on a fresh desktop from reboot and press play, what should happen?

[antoineMoPa]

In my experience, this is a more frequent issue. At least 1 time per day, I hit play hoping to play Spotify in a browser tab or some radio tab and for some reason it opens Apple Music instead. Sometimes it could be an issue on my side, ex: the tab is dead or not even opened.

But whatever, the experience is bad: I have to wait for the Music application startup time, then click the context menu and select "Quit Apple Music". It feels like being forced to watch a product ad. Opening Apple Music is never what I want. Imagine if pressing shift opened TextEdit by default, that would be silly. Or doing CMD-v where you can't paste would automatically pop up some random app.

I feel like no machine response is a correct UX pattern in this case. The absence of sound playback would indicate to me that I need to do something else to play sound.