Rewinding a bit to earlier in the thread:

I'm not 100% sure if the two ".L" lines are needed..

Yes, they do seem to be needed. I tried removing them, and it did not function as expected. In my updated four-button version, it's four ".L" lines, and they all seem to be needed.

But therein lies my question...

The amount of time that it takes for a longpress to be registered seems to double when you use an IR translation like this. Perhaps it doesn't really double, the time for it to register is the same, but then after it's registered, then the IR translate layer has to turn around and send the longpress command to the player. So it seems to take twice as long for the player to respond to that longpress than if the IR translation weren't in place at all. (Once to read/interpret and once to send to the player.)

Can anyone think of a way to write the ir_translate section to work around this additional delay? If not, no worries, because I think that this new code works really well, and I'd happily live with the longer longpresses in order to work around the volume dialog the way it does currently.

Here's a recap of my current ir_translate:

[ir_translate]
Left.L=Left.L
Left=PrevTrack.V,Left.N,Left.U
Right.L=Right.L
Right=NextTrack.V,Right.N,Right.U
Top.L=Top.L
Top=Pause.V,Top.N,Top.U
Bottom.L=Bottom.L
Bottom=Bottom.V,Bottom.N,Bottom.U