iCTRL

iCTRL is a very small and lightweight piece of software which aims to make it easier for your to listen to music through iTunes, by allowing you to jump to the next song in your playlist or skip the current one with just a few keystrokes.

After downloading the program, you can just run it as it is not necessary to install it, its only requirement being that you run it after already having launched iTunes, otherwise it will encounter an error and shutdown.

Because you do not need to install iCTRL in order for it to function, you can easily place it on a USB drive or other such portable memory device, taking it with you wherever you may happen to listen to music from iTunes.

After running the application, you will be able to view a transparent screen listing the name of the currently rendered song in your media player, also suggesting the audio file’s beat, then disappearing after a few seconds.

From the notification area, where iCTRL runs by default, you can activate or deactivate it just by clicking on the eponymous option from its menu. The ‘Info’ section enumerates the keyboard shortcuts that you can use to skip or return to a song, but these cannot be customized, so you can only work with the built-in commands.

As such, in order to jump over an item, you can press ‘Home+PageUp’, while playing the previous file requires you to hit the ‘Home+PageDown’ buttons. At the same time, you can pause the rendering of your iTunes playlist using the ‘Home+End’ keys.

To summarize, iCTRL is an efficient, albeit fairly limited utility whose main purpose is to make it simpler for you to listen to your favorite songs from iTunes, without constantly having to open the media player’s main window to skip or return to the previous file.