I have a windows box I use for certain things, and on it I have a music player that plays from my local library and I use the keyboard play/pause/next/prev buttons to control it.
But recently I found these keyboard buttons were refusing to work! After much diagnoses it turns out that Chrome was over-riding the functions, Now this is actually helpful if you are using Google Music or other music players in the browser. But if you want to disable that so your other player takes control you need to go to: chrome://flags/
And search for “hardware media” and disable that! Hopefully that helps someone from music player frustration syndrome.