Btw. another issue might be that the OP perhaps wants one foot switch to
start and stop, but the quasi default is that there are different
switches/commands for start and stop and stop might provide an option to
continue playing from the start position. So preparing a qwerty-keyboard
might need a script to change the command between play and stop after
each usage of the footswitch.
Do those USB MIDI foot controllers work with Linux, IOW is it possible
to allocate MIDI commands to the switches, without the need to run
Windows/Mac software for doing this?