The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

iTunes 4.5 includes a "feature" that annoys the heck out of me. Taking up valuable space on my already-crammed TiBook's monitor is an additional graphic that appears in the Song Name, Artist and Album columns of the iTunes playlist.

Clicking on one of these tiny icons - a little picture of an arrow - sends the user to the iTunes Music Store and automatically performs a search for corresponding tunes.

I have accidentally clicked on arrows a few times. Each time that it happens is a jarring interruption and I imagine that if I had a dial-up connection to get online the annoyance of having to either wait for the connection or cancel it would be maddening.

Sure, you COULD turn it off in the pref's. But if you like Apple-clutter, a command-line hack in the Terminal may be what you're looking for. It doesn't disable the arrows, but it re-directs the search to your own music library instead of to the online music store.

Here is what you type at the command-line in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

If you want to restore the original functionality of the arrows, just go back to the Terminal, typing the same command, but substituting NO for YES.

...and remember, you can always turn it off entirely!! Look for the "Show Links to Music Store" checkbox in the iTunes General preferences.

[Edited by Dirty to Specify the Preference Location]