Product Reviews

If you regularly use your Mac as a source of music at home, particularly if you stream that music to rooms around the house, the Hercules Tunes Explorer Wireless could be a boon.

Very obviously taking its design cues from the iPod, this wireless remote control provides access to the most commonly used controls in iTunes and, importantly, has an LCD that displays the menus, options and currently playing track.

The idea is that you can control iTunes from the comfort of your sofa, without having to go near your Mac - as long as you've remembered to boot it and log in.

Installation is simple. Install the software, slot the USB transmitter/receiver into a spare

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USB slot, insert two AA batteries into the main unit (not included) and hold down the Select button for a few seconds. After that initial connection, pressing and holding Play/Pause starts up the unit (if it's asleep, putting it to sleep is done the same way) and launches iTunes on your Mac. The menu on the Hercules provides access to your Library, playlists, podcasts and iTunes radio stations. The screen itself is too small for our liking and there are four lines of text crammed into it. This can make it difficult to read, although the blue backlight helps.

You navigate by means of a wheel on the side of the device, which you click to make a selection. This seems an odd way of using the device at first, but quickly becomes second nature.

Other than the size of the screen, our only other complaint is in the layout of the controls. There seems to be a great deal of wasted space on the front of the device. And even if a larger screen would be too costly to be practical, the controls themselves could surely be bigger and better laid out.

At £40, the Tunes Explorer Wireless is reasonably priced, and if your Mac is the main source of music in your house, or if you regularly hook up your MacBook to your hi-fi, it could be exactly what you need.