Trigger spacebar play for live recording

"Live recording" - Pressing play while auto keyframe enabled is amazing .
It allows you to record your mouse motion, enabling more organic animation. However, it's really clumsy to trigger: You have to press play, then trigger your transform tool, THEN hopefully hit the appropriate points on the timeline (if you haven't missed them).

What would be superb, is to be able to hit space to trigger play while in transform (rotate,scale etc).

Currently the modal operator for transform tools is simply cancelled when you hit space.

It would make live recording SO much more intuitive and immediate to use.