Volume control keyboard shortcuts not working in 14.04?

Question

I run Ubuntu 14.04 on a Sony Vaio CS series laptop.

Normally, the volume is controlled by pressing Fn+F2, F3, and F4 for mute, volume down, and volume up respectively.

I accidentally reassigned the volume up keyboard shortcut to a different key. I tried resetting the keyboard shortcut by going into the keyboard shortcuts editor in Ubuntu and pressing Fn+F4, but that didn't work.

My mute function and my volume down functions both work flawlessly, but volume up doesn't work at all. Please don't answer telling me to change the keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcuts manager, as I have already tried that.

Solution

I found a bug report on launchpad regarding this issue and it seems when reassigning the media keys some prefix is missing. The following lines are somewhat of a summary of what is discussed in bug report

You can issue the following command to see your current keybinding:

gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up

Output should be XF86AudioRaiseVolume but when I use system setting's GUI and check I find it's value to be AudioRaiseVolume.

You can either reset them via either:

gsettings reset org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up

or

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys volume-up "XF86AudioRaiseVolume"

Of course the latter is more specific and might not work with all systems out there but I I was happy to find out it's just the string XF86 missing so e.g. I could bind terminal to calculator media key:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys terminal "XF86Calculator"

For a list of possible keys to map you can use

 gsettings list-keys org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys

play is actually play/pause !

If your setup is different you might want to figure out your media key's name and set it via dconf. I haven't done it myself but it is mentioned in a comment which in turns links back to another askubuntu-question: Where are GNOME keyboard shortcuts stored?.

---

Edit: Couldn't help but to play around with it a little bit and as my keyboard is lacking some Previous/Next buttons I found CTRL+Volume-Down/CTRL+Volume-Up useful:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys previous "<Primary>XF86AudioLowerVolume"
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys next "<Primary>XF86AudioRaiseVolume"

Comments

[Admin]

Same problem here... It was working fine in 13.04 but now nothing in 14.04.1

[MinecraftShamrock]

Replacing AudioRaiseVolume to XF86AudioRaiseVolume fixed a similar problem I had. Thank you :D

[jmiserez]

This works. The bugfix has been backported to 14.04, currently it's in the trusty-proposed repository. You can enable the repository in the Software & Updates control panel and then the sound should also work with just AudioRaiseVolume.

[Hamman Samuel]

@yoshi You mentioned "when I use system setting's GUI and check I find it's value to be AudioRaiseVolume". How can I access the setting's GUI? I'm running Lubuntu 15.04

[nuala]

@HammanSamuel I refer to the general system settings and more specifically they keyboard option where short cuts can be set up. However I'm running ubuntu12.04 so experience may vary :/

[MichaelChirico]

No luck for me. The prefix was there like it should be when I ran this command :\ What's strange is if I go through keyboard shortcuts, the prefix is missing (where as it's there for the buttons that are working, e.g. Mute), but this command shows the prefix.