One of the most overblown software/hardware categories these days are iTunes controllers: there’s thousands of them. I’ve already reviewed my favorite, but thought that I’d give mention to another one that I’ve tried.

Like I said, there’s a whole bunch of iTunes controllers out there, but one of the founding members of the iTunes Controller category was Synergy, which puts three little controls in your menubar for controlling iTunes, and also includes a number of other nice and interesting features. The downside to it though: it costs money. However, there’s another app out there which is fairly similar, called ByteController.

ByteController is actually fairly similar to Synergy: its main function, like Synergy, is to put the same previous/play-pause/next buttons into the menubar. It’s also skinnable, and comes with a number of skins which you can choose from to determine how the buttons appear in the menubar. Another Synergy feature here, it also lets you set hotkeys for controlling your iTunes from your keyboard, and ByteController includes Growl support. But what it doesn’t borrow from Synergy is its price tag: ByteController is 100% freeware.

All-in-all, ByteController works as advertised and pretty well, although I wish that it had an option to disable Growl notifications, as I’ve already got a few other things that gives me Growl notifications for my music. I ended up ditching it when I got the more powerful (but more costly) CoverSutra, but for someone looking for a free, simple way to control their iTunes experience from afar, ByteController is a very economical way to go.

Final Rating:

Tags: iTunes, Mac, menubar, music, review, Software, Synergy