Using earphone buttons as triggers

My BeatsX wireless earphones have buttons for volume up, volume down, and play/pause. My AirPods Pro similarly have a “squeeze to click” virtual button to do play/pause. With all the time I’m spending lately on video conference calls with software like Zoom, I’d like to be able to make the play/pause wireless earphone button trigger mute/unmute in the video conference app. Is there any way to configure a play/pause wireless earphone button as a trigger to run a Keyboard Maestro macro?

I don't think there is any way for Keyboard Maestro to detect those I'm afraid. Keyboard Maestro can detect USB HID events that look like buttons, so if the wireless buttons come in through a USB dongle, and if that dongle sends them as HID events, and if the software that handles that does not take exclusive control of the device, then maybe the USB Device Key trigger would work - it is easily tested, just create the trigger, and press the button and see if Keyboard Maestro can detect it. But failing that, I doubt there is any way to detect the button press.

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Thanks for the quick reply Peter! I did try using the USB Device Key trigger, but it didn’t detect the play/pause button press. Not a big surprise, since the earphones are Bluetooth devices, not USB. Perhaps that’s why the videoconference apps don’t do this already. Perhaps I should file a bug report with Apple about adding an OS API to support this…

Yes, there is not much with the Bluetooth API I'm afraid - I can't even detect devices connecting or disconnecting via Bluetooth.

The USB HID stuff is pretty much just trying to detect values as they pass through the system. I'm not sure how the Bluetooth system works or if there is a similar sort of queue of events, or if it is all done with drivers.

On top of BlueTooth is Apple’s own set of protocols. I would guess that’s even less scrutable than vanilla BlueTooth. Probably nicer but never mind.