Winamp has been my media player of choice for years because it is fairly lightweight, and has a long history off plugins. Winamp also has the ability to use global hot keys which are keyboard shortcuts to play, pause and skip through tracks even if you’re using another application.
Since I got the iPhone, I’ve been leaving iTunes open more and more. And since version 8 was released, I’ve been trying out the Genius play list. The genius can be good, but sometimes it sticks an odd track in there and you need to skip. The bummer is that iTunes doesn’t support global hot keys.
I can’t listen to music on a computer and work if I have to flip back to the media player just to change tracks , so I finally got around to searching for a solution and came upon Jacob Hickman’s iTunes global hotkey project. I like it so far–it adds a “toast” or little roll-up/roll-down status display when you skip tracks and has a fun Domo-kun tray icon. Check it out, if you’re a PC iTunes user.
Hey!
I had the exact same problem! Thanks a lot for the info!
Cheers!
I had been using Winamp too, mainly because of the size of the player. I tried Jacob Hickman’s program but he is no longer supporting it and it has a few issues. I did find a another program called SkiniTunes (www.skinitunes.com) that so far seems to work great. It gives me the hotkeys and even pulls lyrics from the web so they sync into my iPhone. Plus I get the small player and its skinnable like Winamp.
You may also be interested in iTunesControl, which provides more features and is actively developed, unlike iTunes Global Hotkeys.