iTunes Helper

iTunes Helper comes across as an iTunes assistant, providing users with a higher dose of control over the player without putting much effort into it.

Although it has many advantages, iTunes is not the most user oriented player out there, posing difficulties especially for beginners. Being able to control it to the fullest will never be possible unless you’ve got a utility such as iTunes Helper by your side.

Although it’s a relatively simple application, much good can come from it. Aside from its interface, which could use a little makeover, there’s nothing to complain about.

Needless to say, in order to benefit from its features, you need to have iTunes installed. Then, you can explore the main GUI, where all the options are displayed in plain view.

The first option will force iTunes to pause playback during system lock, while the second one will pause the player if a certain application process is launched, which you have to specify in a list inside the dedicated field. If you want the list to contain more than one process, you should enter the choices separated by a semicolon.

You can also associate actions such as previous, next, play or pause, volume up and volume down with hotkeys of your choice. Thus, you no longer have to use the controls inside iTunes to perform such common operations.

All in all, iTunes Helper is efficient but could use a better design and maybe a richer array of features to allow more operations and to fool iTunes into behaving just the way you want it.