iRemote Lite

iRemote Lite allows you to control music playback on iTunes. The application is basically a small window with four different buttons.

These buttons are "Next", "Play/Pause", "Previous" and "Song Info". If you have iTunes running and music playing, you can use the buttons to either go to the next song or the previous one, pause playback or resume it. The nice thing about the "Play/Pause" button is that if iTunes is not running, it will launch it and start playing a random song. iRemote Lite supports notifications using Growl. But the notification only is shown when you click on the "Song Info" button, which displays the name of the song that is playing at the moment. It would be nice if the app added a notification when new songs are played. To use the "Song Info" button, you have to have Growl installed.

iRemote Lite stays on top of other applications and you can close the window by clicking on the "X" and then re-launch it from the MenuBar.

All in all, the functionality that you get from iRemote Lite comes standard in all of Apple's keyboards, including Macbook Pro's, but maybe Hackintosh users can benefit from it since they probably don't have dedicated keys.