Pausing and playing music inside the Xbox Music app on Windows 8 takes a minimum of three clicks from the desktop. If I were to purchase a Multimedia keyboard with pause, play, fast forward, and rewind buttons, would they work while being at the Desktop?
If I don't own a multimedia keyboard, would I be able to use something like AutoHotkey to achieve the same result?
I can speak from my experience. I have a Dell keyboard that looks like this:
Above the Insert and Home keys there is a block of multimedia control keys: Play/Pause, Stop, Skip Back, Skip Forward.
If I have music playing in the Music app, these keys work as expected. When I use them I get visual feedback, too. In the top-left corner of the screen, where the volume display normally shows, information about what is playing is added whenever I press those multimedia keys on the keyboard.
Take a look at this answer to see how to use AutoHotKey to remap available key combinations to send the multimedia key codes your keyboard cannot produce natively.
