There is always another way and people are, well, different. Though I’m generally a keyboard jockey, the appeal of iTunes control app Synergy is obvious for the mousers among you — Play/pause and previous/next track buttons on the Menu Bar.

For those with lots of screen real estate, the oft praised iTunes 11 Mini Player is a better choice. Those working on a 11 or 13 inch MacBook screen will wanna go with Synergy 5, which is now all about Mountain Lion:

• Synergy is now a 64-bit application, and will only run on Macs capable of running 64-bit applications
• Synergy now requires Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or later
• Rewrite Hot Key handling code to work in 64-bit environment
• Fix album cover art breakage caused by 64-bit iTunes
• Removed legacy code related to very old versions of iTunes (older than 4.7)
• Update “Help” button target to point at current documentation
• Replace many deprecated API calls with more modern equivalents
• Sanitize and clean-up Clang warnings
• Adapt to latest Xcode toolchain
• Qualified for use with iTunes 11.0.1
• Removed out-of-date and incomplete localizations
• Removed Growl support, pending possible replacement with “Mist”

Not sure why a user would need iTunes Growl support via Synergy, but it’s gone perhaps to be replaced by Mist, a part of the Growl SDK. One imagines Notification and/or Growl, depends on how you set these things up, will still display notifications from iTunes.

Synergy is free for seven days and it costs €5 thereafter.

Related posts:
— A Dozen Candles for iTunes Birthday
— What’s New in iTunes 11
— iTunes Store: Happy 9th Birthday
— Mac OS X: Happy Eleventeenth Birthday