Dedicated Music Controller

All I want is a dedicated music controller on the touchbar. I frequently need to pause music to listen to a video, but the media controller jumps to whatever is currently on the screen. I hate this feature. why do I need to use the touchbar for things that are currently on the screen?? I want the touchbar to control things that are NOT present on the screen. I don't seem have the time or mental acuity to figure out BTT, its user interface seems to be all over the places and it uses a system of categorization that doesn't make sense to me. Has anyone developed a preset for this?

You can check out GoldenChaos GoldenChaos-BTT: The complete Touch Bar UI replacement ... and disable dock badges and the rest of the stuff you do not need. The media player controller will always be active if you enable it in its settings:

The media player is bound to Music though, it switches depending on what media is playing on. This is not at all convenient, I have trouble understanding why anyone would want it to switch to a web browser when you are looking at the web browser. The point of player controls is that music is almost always playing in the background. I want dedicated keys that only play, pause, and go to next track on Music only.

Basically the keys in the preset above are mapped so that they function just as the actual media keys in your keyboard would. Which application responds to it, is out of the control of BTT... having said that, if you are using Chrome and you do not want the browser to respond to the media keys, you can turn that off via

chrome://flags/#hardware-media-key-handling

(type the above in your Chrome address bar) and setting it to disabled

Another alternative would be to check out https://beardedspice.github.io/ and configure it to only forward the media keys to a specific app.

Of course, finally, you may also write your own handler and have it execute some AppleScript which only sends commands to the Music app.

for instance, to trigger Play, the script would be

tell application "Music" to playpause