since my migration to panther i was looking for a decent controller for itunes. the problem was, that my favorite freeware app (PTHitunesnotifier, now a 70$ shareware: youcontrol) to control itunes did not work on panther.
the problem is, that i often want to switch to the next track, because i’m not in the mood to listen to the current one (i have a really broad library of about 1500 songs, which are normally set to play on random, so sometimes the one coming up, doesn’t fit).
up to now i could achieve that with keyboard maestro which did the hot-key control for itunes, sparing me the right-click on the dock-icon of itunes and then selecting: “next song”. i can just hit F7 to pause or F8 to skip to the next song, greatly decreasing the change to get distracted from my current task.
one thing i was missing though is the announcement of the current song, which was what PTHitunesnotifier did really nicely for me.
that’s where synergy comes in handy. it has a nice pop-up window – called floater – which announces the current track (as seen on the left). synergy also has good hotkey-control for itunes, so my F7 and F8-keys have something to do, and features also a nifty menu-bar control, which comes in handy sometimes. the only drawback is that it costs 5€, so it’s not free.
but hey, i can start it ten times until it wants the serial, which makes it possible for me to use it for free for nearly three months if i do not reboot too often :-)
and then i will gladly shell out those bucks if i haven’t found anything better…
do you use a controller for itunes or have a better suggestion for me? leave a comment.
Until now, I was using the little itunes remote from Konfabulator which is free and quite ok. it’s just not so damn cool, because it needs space on my screen and doesn’t work with shortcuts, but check it out.
hi,
iMote do the same thing and it’s free…
this post is anyways obsolete now. i exclusively use quicksilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ ) for all my notification needs…