Clementine shortcuts not working in Ocelot 11.10

Ok so another gripe about the recent Ubuntu Ocelot upgrade… its blitz’d my shortcuts to control Clementine media player (easily my favourite player in Linux, looks and features).

Before upgrading I used to control Clementine via the ‘Windows’ key on my laptop, however after upgrading I get this lovely black block appear whenever I try to use any of them:

After hunting around I found this is likely to be to down to Gnome being updated and therefore not directly Ubuntu’s fault. Anyhow I assumed it had just wiped my Clementine shortcuts, but going into the options “Tools > Preferences > Global Shortcuts” I found that attempting to add my old shortcuts back in manually threw the following error:

The "gnome-keybinding-properties" command could not be started

Sigh. Ok we’ll just edit the global Gnome shortcuts instead, perhaps they’re conflicting somehow. But alas… where has the option gone from the menus?!? Needless to say it was back to Google to find out how to even get to the shortcuts menu. Turns out if you run the following from terminal it opens, although I’m still at a loss how you’re meant to find it if you stick to the GUI:

gnome-control-center keyboard

Then its under “Shortcuts > Sound and Media“. The only way I managed to get the conflict resolved was to clear the Gnome shortcuts by pressing backspace when it says “new shortcut…”, then entering my old Clementine shortcuts back in Clementine’s properties menu. Not a brilliant way around the bug/issue, but the black box of denial was driving me mad and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Again, I hope this article helps!