Factotum lets you use your keyboard to control your favorite online music sites [Mac]

The web has seen the introduction of a lot of music streaming services lately. Ever since the internet has embraced the concept of “the cloud”, more and more services have come forward allowing you to maintain a music collection, without wasting any local storage space.

A lot of these sites offer a browser-based music player environment to manage and control your music — my personal favorites being Grooveshark and Rdio. However, since these are browser-based offerings, the media keys on your keyboard do not work to control the music. You can, of course, use the desktop players that they offer, but I often find myself using just the browser to listen to my playlists.

Luckily, there’s Factotum. Factotum is a nifty little app that sits in your menubar and lets you use your keyboard media keys to control Previous/Next/Play/Pause functions on a host of music streaming services.

There’s no configuration necessary, nor any preferences to change. The app uses the Option+Shift modifier keys along with the music keys to carry out the corresponding action from your browser.

Factotum supports 16 of the popular music streaming sites, including Grooveshark, Rdio and thesixtyone. A update with Amazon Cloud Player compatibility is coming soon. It’s available on the Mac App Store for $3.99 and presently only supports Safari and Chrome browsers.