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.

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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.