why doesn’t OSX pause my music from iTunes when I watch a YouTube vid like it does on my phone or iPad?

V Annoying.

because it can multitask as opposed to iOS which can really only do one thing at a time.

Oh 😉

If you open multiple tabs with many youtube vids they’ll all play at once…

This is theoretically possible, and indeed a desirable feature – which they are spoiling people with by including it (as a work around no less) in IOS.

The closest you will get is something like quicksilver to create a shortcut for it (or even, just pressing the pause button (F8) on the keyboard).

Other than that, you could write something – there are some suggestions here.

because it can multitask as opposed to iOS which can really only do one thing at a time.

@jam bo – now you know that’s not true. iOS can play music whilst browsing with Safari

@thekingisdead – it’s a good enough question – not uncommon to have conflicting sounds from multiple Safari tabs with videos in and/or your iTines example. It’s harder for OSX designers to decide which is the dominant window (which iOS can do as only one display at each time) – you can have multiple windows open with multiple videos/music all visible so which one plays on the speakers ?

iOS can play music whilst browsing with Safari

iOS can play music while any app can be selected and opened, not just played through apps that can play music as a secondary function, like navigation apps. Just tried it on my old iP4, just to confirm what I thought happened.

you can have multiple windows open with multiple videos/music all visible so which one plays on the speakers ?

At that point it becomes less clear as to which should be dominant – in cases where it is more clear – i.e. one youtube window visible – then it should;t be too much of a stretch to pause other music playing when it plays back – in more complex situations then some kind of selector tab to identify the desired “live” video for audio output wouldn’t go a miss in the tab (next to the “play” icon…) with an off button to allow you to hear all the audio at once.