- iTunes’ browser as God intended: No. Genres.
As a little addendum to last night’s piece on how to get rid of the useless and disconcerting ‘genre’ column from iTunes 8’s browser view in OS X, I’m posting the solution for Windows users. This information’s probably all over the place by now, but having just tried (and failed) to post the solution on someone else’s blog in answer to their question (I couldn’t get the acute brackets to appear in the reply), I’m duty bound to put it up here if only for that blogger’s benefit.
What you need to do is go to C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes and edit the iTunesPrefs.xml file to add the following two lines:
<key>show-genre-when-browsing</key>
<data>False</data>
Then Bob, I’m told, will be your Uncle. Just for the sake of completeness, you can also remove those (to some) annoying links from each track to the iTunes Store. On a Mac, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
then hit enter. In Windows, go to the same file as specified above and add the following:
<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>False</data>
Thus is the natural order of things restored, and sweet harmony brought to the world.
The campaign to have the foul, near-ubiquitous, and nearly always useless ‘Genre’ tag (is it a school? a style? an ilk? a class?) removed from the interface altogether starts here. Vote with your CLIs, and Think Different. Oh, and send feedback to Apple. Because they should know better.
Thanks for the Windows tips! Worked great!
Thank you so much for the Windows hint!
If you’re using Vista, the prefs file is in:
C:\Users\$USER$\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes where $USER$ is your username
Thank you so much for this. It works likes a charm. I use Vista and the first set of instructions is the ticket.
this didn’t work for some reason
Okay. I don’t really use iTunes on my Windows PC, but I’ve tried a more detailed solution on it and it works here (running XP, by the way). You do need to add the code I mentioned in my post, but make sure you insert it right near the end of the file, immediately before the following:
(acute bracket)/dict(acute bracket)
(acute bracket)/dict(acute bracket)
(acute bracket)/plist(acute bracket)
If you enter the additional text after those tags, it won’t work. Enter it right before them, and it does (it works for me anyway).
(Apologies for the slightly embarrassing use of the phrase ‘acute bracket’ to denote – er – an acute bracket: I’m not sure how you get them to appear in blog comments, and although I could Google it I thought it better to get the solution posted as soon as possible.)
Good luck.
Thanks for the Windows tip- those arrows/links were really annoying!
Wonderful – thanks Phillip!
Thanks a bunch for the windows tip.
for some reason it didn’t work on mine…
Amazing!!! Many, many thanks!!!! Got rid of those arrows in XP straight away! Much appreciated!
Very helpful, thanks! Genre classifications really are just terrible. Also, for those who got confused like I did, it works with Wordpad but not with Notepad.
Many thanks. This was my biggest pet peeve with iTunes 8.
Thanks for the help! It seems that Apple is on crack sometimes.
Wicked, was peeved that apple took that option out… i mean why?.. thank you so much.
Thank you so, so much. Took me a while to figure out how to do it even with your blog post (I’m nearly computer illiterate at times… and thanks to HelmetUCF for saying where the file is in Vista.
Those arrows were literally driving me mad!
Wow!!!… Excellent solution… I don’t know why Apple remove the option to view or not the “Genre” column in the browser…
Apple suppose goes beyond of think better… mmm…
Awesome tip, thanks! Finally got rid of those annoying little arrows. I don’t understand why apple would remove the option to get rid of those arrows.
Fantastique ! Génial ! This hint works great on Windows. Many thanks !
Thanks! The genre thing was soo annoying and i never use it, and then with the iTunes 8 upgrade it just appeared again but i couldn’t turn it off. Thanks so much for this fix
Umm… Has anyone stumbled on an encoded iTunesPrefs.xml file? I’m running Vista and I installed iTunes 8 today. I went to change the iTunesPrefs.xml file to take the links off but, it’s encoded using UTF-8.
Has anyone stumbled on an encoded iTunesPrefs.xml file? I’m running Vista and I installed iTunes 8 today. I tried to change the iTunesPrefs.xml file to take the links off but, it’s encoded using UTF-8.
hi-
thanks so much for the fix, but it didn’t work for me! i’ve tried this fix before, and it totally worked, but itunes went wonky recently and replaced the arrows.
so i went to do the fix again, and now the file is just reading garbage – thousands of capital As and then a tiny bit of code at the end.
is apple getting smarter? as in, did they engineer it so i can’t read the code in the file anymore. i know i’m looking at the right file, and i’ve accessed it many different ways as well.
anybody have any thoughts on this? thanks in advance for your help!
I use and like the genres column! The trick is you have to define your own genres, using a prefix. Eg. [C] String Quartets (meaning Classical music, String Quartets) or [P] Folk (meaning Popular music, Folk). If you add a new CD, you notice it very easily and can change it to your own genres.
It worked with Notepad but not wordpad. The detailed instructions helped.