I want to tell you guys about this amazing little piece of software that I recently found (actually a little over 2 months ago). If you use iTunes to handle you music collection and listen you your music you should give it a try.
It is called iTunesKeys (
http://www.mattberube.com/software/ituneskeys/) and it is a freeware software that sits on the system tray and lets you control iTunes. You can play/pause, go to the next song and show iTunes by simply clicking or double clicking on the tray icon. You can also use the trayicon menu to set the song rating, etc. It also shows the current song info (name, album, artist and rating) on a tooltip.
If you use iTunes but are tired of having to show the iTunes window just to pause/continue playing music you should try this little program.
If you decide to use it, I'd recommend that you enable the iTunes "Minimize iTunes window to the system tray" option (on the Advanced tab of the preferences) and also configure the system tray to always hide the iTunes tray icon. That way you can just use the iTunesKeys tray icon to control iTunes.
I hope you guys like it! ;D
Amadawn
P.S.- By the way, the developper is super-nice. I contacted him to ask him to add some little functionality (notably, make it possible to skip to the next track by double-right-clicking on the iTunesKeys tray icon) and although it took him a while to answer me he made the change and was very open to comments. :)