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iTunes 8 Store Arrow Links

When this was introduced in whatever version of iTunes it came out on I thought that “feature” was superfluous and stupid. Most of the time when the links were clicked they were clicked accidentally. Thankfully they could be easily removed by going to iTunes’ preferences. Well for stupid reasons that are beyond me Apple decided to take this preference setting out of iTunes 8’s preference dialog, leaving the setting unreachable except by intermediate and advanced users of Mac OS X or Windows. Within minutes of iTunes 8’s release Mac OS X Hints released an article telling people how to remove the annoying links for Mac OS X by opening a Terminal window and typing this in:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Now I’m going to be uncommonly nice to Windows users here and state how to get rid of them on Windows as well. I ran a quick search and couldn’t find a quick place to find out the information on Windows, so I figured it out myself. Changing the setting is a bit more difficult in Windows. There are some requirements. You need a decent text editor because the preference file is stored with Unix line endings (LF) so Notepad isn’t capable of handling line breaks other than Windows (CRLF). If you do not have one TextEdit would do.

Make sure iTunes is closed and open C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml in your preferred text editor and do a search for User Preferences. In-between the dict element that comes after the key element containing User Preferences type:

<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>False</data>

See? I’m not mean to Windows users all the time.