Simultaneously listening to audio on VLC and transcribing in Word

[cherclar3cat]

Hi all. I'm on a MacBook/Catalina and just updated VLC 3.0.14.
I need to transcribe audios that I've loaded into VLC and type the transcription in Word, simultaneously.
I load the MP3 into VLC and play. I want to pause and play via the external keyboard, so that i don't have to leave Word and click on VLC to pause.
This used to be easy. VLC has changed something and no longer makes this easy.

Now, while in Word, whenever I press F8, the key I used to use to pause and play VLC, Word just opens Apple Music. Very time consuming.

Chrome has free Otranscribe, which accomplishes this nicely, plus provides time stamps, but has a memory problem and is glitchy. I would rather use VLC and be confident that Word will save my transcript, even if I have to type the times in myself. Thank you for your reply.