Posted Friday, April 30, 2004

Toggle Your iTunes Link Arrows with these AppleScripts

Much has already been written about the link arrows that iTunes 4.5 displays next to each song in your library. To recap: click an arrow to go to relevant songs in the iTunes Music Store; Option-click an arrow to go to relevant songs in your local library.

The Option-key trick is all well and good, but many iTunes users are after a more-permanent solution. The always-excellent Mac OS X Hints site publicized one such solution yesterday: opening Terminal and pecking in a command that reverses the way the link arrows work: Option-click to search the music store, click to drill into your local library.

That got me to thinking. How about an AppleScript that would allow you to toggle the link arrow behavior?

I mentioned this to a much-smarter-than-I-am colleague, Jonathan Q. Woolson, and he wrote the following scripts.

Download iTunes Arrow Scripts (36K StuffIt archive).

This archive contains two scripts: "Set iTunes Arrows to Local" and "Set iTunes Arrows to Music Store." You can run them right from the Finder, or you can install them in the iTunes Scripts menu to be able to toggle iTunes' behavior from within the program itself. To do the latter, stash them in Library > iTunes > Scripts.

Happy toggling!

Me-commerce department. These scripts -- and more, including a collection of the best of Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes -- are on the DVD that comes with my book, The Macintosh iLife '04. Almost 300 full-color pages, every one of them updated for iLife '04. A two-hour instructional DVD that dovetails with the book and also contains GarageBand loops, sample projects, and utilities and plug-ins for all five iLife programs. All for the insane price of $20.99 at Amazon.com.