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October 30, 2006

tips

Make iTunes arrows point the way to your own music

Posted Oct. 30, ’06, 9:54 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

iTunes arrowsGood as they are with design, sometimes Apple still sacrifices useful functionality for the potential of making a buck. I speak of those little gray arrows in iTunes that show up next to the song name, artist name, and album name (if you don’t see them, you can check off “Show links to the iTunes Store” in iTunes’s preferences).

These links showed up as of iTunes 4.5; if you clicked on one, it would take you to the iTunes Store and show you other tracks with that title, by the same artist, or on the same album respectively. In iTunes 7, only the currently selected and currently playing tracks display the arrows.

However, it’s much more useful if you option-click the arrows; that will, instead, show you every track in your own Library with that title, artist, or album name. Think of it as a shortcut to using the Browse feature.

Even better, you can make swap the two actions, making the Library function the default and the Store function only occur when you hold down option. All it takes is a quick trip to the command-line. Open up Terminal and enter the following line:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

If you ever want to change it back, put NO instead of YES. Somehow, I doubt you will.


2 Comments

Joel Jambon said:

Thank You! I have been longing for this feature to work like this. This is extremely useful.

October 30, 2006 12:04 PM
Patrick Gage said:

Is it possible to make this behavior default on PCs?

October 30, 2006 12:06 PM

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