Cover Stream

Cover Stream is an app that lets you control iTunes from your desktop. It puts a nice icon on the bottom, left corner of your desktop that you can use to control iTunes.

From there you can start iTunes, switch songs, play and pause, etc. One of the good things about this application is that it lets you see your songs in a cover flow view, which has been made very popular by iTunes. There is also support for Last.fm.

Cover Stream also gives you lots of options to control the playback. Of course, you can use the desktop icon, but you can also use the menubar icon or the dock icon. From the menubar, for example, you can show the browser, activate jukebox mode, and access the preferences, among other things.

There is a nice notification system that displays pop-up notifications when a new song is played. Those notifications show some basic information about the songs so you know which song is playing without having to launch iTunes. If you don't like the notification system, you can use Growl.

From the preferences window, you can change the artwork size for the desktop icon and customize hotkeys.