Apple has a very slick tool, called "Remote.app" that allows you to control music playback on a PC running iTunes, see.
It lets you quickly select and queue songs for playback, and adjust the volume among other things. What's the best linux-compatible alternative? I'm not married to a particular music player on my PC - Banshee, Rhythmbox, whatever, I'm open.
My ideal vision is laying on the couch queuing up songs without having to turn on a monitor. Wow.. putting it like that makes me feel lazy.
Anyway...VNC is cumbersome...surely there's a better way?
You can do it with mpd.
You have to set up the daemon such that it allows ssh connection (basically comment the line
bind to adress: 127.0.0.1in the config file/etc/mpd/), then it will play in the background. You can then control it from any client (i.e. from any device which can connect to your PC) there is a list there:http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients
Some of them are particuliarly designed for Iphone. Some are php clients also, which can be fun.
This is what I'm using at home and it works perfectly!
If you have an iPhone/iPod touch that you want to use you can install Songbird - although it is not under developement for Linux you can still get an unsupported version.
https://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Builds/Contributed_Builds#Linux
iTunes has an app for songbird that you can use to do exactly the same as it's remote - I've tried it and it works fine on Linux.
I think you should take a look on this list: http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/08/5-android-apps-for-remotely-controlling.html